Am Samstag, den 04.10.2014, 15:05 -0500 schrieb Jim Nasby: > On 10/4/14, 1:21 PM, Jeff Janes wrote: > > On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 6:21 AM, Michael Banck wrote: > > we have seen repeatedly that users can be confused about why PostgreSQL > > is not shutting down even though they requested it. Usually, this is > > because `log_checkpoints' is not enabled and the final checkpoint is > > being written, delaying shutdown. As no message besides "shutting down" > > is written to the server log in this case, we even had users believing > > the server was hanging and pondering killing it manually. > > > > >> Wouldn't a better place to write this message be the terminal from >> which "pg_ctl stop" was invoked, rather than the server log file?
Looking at it from a DBA perspective, this would indeed be better, yes.
However, I see a few issues with that:
1. If you are using an init script (or another wrapper around pg_ctl), you don't get any of its output it seems.
2. Having taken a quick look at pg_ctl, it seems to just kill the postmaster on shutdown and wait for its PID file to disappear. I don't see how it should figure out that PostgreSQL is waiting for a checkpoint to be finished?
It could just print out a reminder that a checkpoint will occur, depending on what mode of shutdown was requested. I don't think this reminder has be validated by the server itself, the intention should be enough.
Most people who don't know that a clean shutdown inherently involves a checkpoint probably don't monitor the server log closely, either. Of course if they use packager scripts to do the shutdown and those scripts don't pass along the message, I guess that still doesn't help.
