Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> We discussed this when that patch got in (82233ce7ea42d6b). The reason
> for not waiting, it was argued, is that the most likely reason for those
> processes not to have already gone away by the time we send SIGKILL was
> that they are stuck somewhere in the kernel, and so we might not be able
> to actually get them to go away with the SIGKILL. As I recall, that was
> the actual problem that MauMau was trying to get fixed.
Hm, I reviewed the discussion and actually I'm wrong: I came up with
the unkillable process argument on my own. MauMau's problem was a
deadlocked process because of trying to malloc() on its way out.
I still think that unkillable processes are an issue, but perhaps it's
sane to have postmaster wait for some time instead of just going away
immediately.
--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
