On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

On ons, 2009-09-16 at 12:05 -0500, Kevin Grittner wrote:
Well, with differences in behavior, of course, like attempting a fast
shutdown, and escalating to an immediate shutdown if that doesn't
succeed in the allowed time.

Right, but if you think that this behavior the right/better one (which
it arguably isn't), why shouldn't it be available from the mainline
tools?  Obviously, most people have felt for the last N years that
pg_ctl provides adequate shutdown options.

I've implemented exactly the same logic Kevin describes for a past consulting customer and for multiple forms of shutdown scripts at Truviso. I would suggest the situation here is that it's so easy to script a custom solution that the other people who have done the same don't have any motivation to get that fixed upstream, which would take a bunch of arguing on this list to accomplish. Easier to just work around it and move on.

You're correct that pg_ctl provides "adequate" options here in the respect that it's possible to build the behavior many people want from the primitives available. I'm with Kevin that what many people would like to see in a system shutdown script is not possible using pg_ctl alone. Fast shutdown, timeout, then immediate shutdown is absolutely the best default behavior if the server must go down, but you can afford to wait a bit to try and do that more cleanly than going straight to immediate.

To answer the next question, "why doesn't fast shutdown work for you?", see http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2009-03/msg00062.php

If that were fixed maybe fast shutdown would be more useful, as it is I have to assume it will fail because open COPYs are pretty common for our apps. But I don't want to go straight to immediate for the sake of other programs that can shut themselves down more cleanly if the server goes through the fast shutdown stage first.

--
* Greg Smith gsm...@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

--
Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers

Reply via email to