BTW, related to the crash dump work: I wanted to see if I could get any integration into Windows Error Reporting for Pg, because it'd be nice to be able to use Microsoft's servers to aggregate crash reports and collect data on problems. WER (on Windows 7 and Vista) also provides automatic management of retained local copies of crash dumps, automatic bundling of related files, automatic out-of-process debugging, etc.
WER has been significantly improved in Windows Visa / 7 and may be worth considering enabling its use when Pg is installed on those platforms. Do you think there'd be any interest in re-enabling WER when installation on win7 / vista is detected? I've seen mention that the win32 installers "go to some lengths" to disable WER because it tends to hang the server while waiting for a user prompt. I was wondering if/how the installer disables WER for Pg? There aren't any calls to AddERExcludedApplication() or WerAddExcludedApplication() in the Pg sources. Pg doesn't appear under: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting within an ExcludedApplications key either. WHY WINDOWS ERROR REPORTING? ============================ WER on Windows 7 permits things like an out-of-process debugger to be invoked. Once the postmaster knows how to manage generic children (as has been discussed to permit better integration of PgAgent among other things) it could also become responsible for doing out-of-process crash dumping and error reporting on crashed children rather than having to do potentially unreliable self-debugging as is presently the case. It might not even be necessary to do that much, as WER on win7/vista offers so much more configurability. On Win7/vista you can also set WER up not to block execution while it waits for user input, and to prompt the user even when the user is running under a different security level. It can automatically bundle postgresql.conf, the most recent log file, etc when an error report is sent. By contrast to app-generated minidumps, most importantly it doesn't require the user to do anything more than click "yes" for an error report to be collected and become available for analysys of most frequent failures. The downside is that it requires a *business* to register for access to WER data, and that business must obtain a VeriSign code signing cert (US$99 if obtained for WER purposes). This might be something the EDB folks would be interested in, especially as it should also permit shipping of signed Pg binaries, which is great for protecting against AV software, making it easier to deploy in business environments, etc. Note that Windows Error Reporting doens't eliminate the utility of the crashdumps feature, as self-crashdumps are easily accessible to and configurable by the local user/admin and work fine on Windows XP. The current self-generated crash dumps also contain more information than you'll usually get from a WER dump, though it may be possible to customise WER so it includes the same information. I'd really like to know more about past experience with Windows Error Reporting, because I'd like to investigate whether it's worth using in future with a few tweaks for win7 use. -- System & Network Administrator POST Newspapers -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
