Excerpts from Tom Lane's message of mié ago 04 12:37:23 -0400 2010:
> Fujii Masao <masao.fujii@gmail.com> writes:
> > 6. ... the bgwriter had already ended even though there was a backend in
> > progress. Postmaster regarded this situation as abnormal and caused the
> > recovery.
>
> > In 8.3 or later, since postmaster doesn't regard that situation as abnormal
> > and just waits for all backends to exit again, the problem doesn't happen.
> > I think that this is a bug in 8.2 and should be fixed in the same way as 8.3
> > does. Thought?
>
> My recollection is that that change was associated with some pretty
> significant revisions to the postmaster state machine. I'm concerned
> about the risks involved in back-patching that. This seems to be a
> corner case with pretty minimal consequences anyway, so I'm inclined
> to leave 8.2 alone.
IIRC this is the kind of thing that "dead-end backends" were invented
for. It was too a large patch for backpatching, IMHO.
--
Ãlvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support