Peter Eisentraut said:
> During a recent training session I was reminded about a peculiar
> misbehavior that recent PostgreSQL releases exhibit when the TCP port
> they are trying to bind to is occupied:
>
> LOG: could not bind IPv4 socket: Address already in use
> HINT: Is another postmaster already running on port 5432? If not, wait
> a few seconds and retry.
> WARNING: could not create listen socket for "localhost"
>
> The trainees found this behavior somewhat unuseful. Can someone remind
> me why this is not an error? Does any other server software behave
> this way?
>
IIRC, in previous versions any bind failure was fatal, but in 8.0 we decided
to be slightly more forgiving and only bail out if we failed to bind at all.
cheers
andrew
