I said: > But the backends would only have the socket open, they'd not be actively > listening to it. So how could you tell whether anyone had the socket > open or not?
Oh, I take that back, I see how you could do it: the postmaster opens the socket *for writing*, but never actually writes. All its child processes inherit that same open file descriptor and just keep it around. Then, to tell if anyone's home, you open the socket *for reading* and try to read in O_NONBLOCK mode. You get an EOF indication if and only if no one has the socket open for writing; otherwise you get an EAGAIN error. That would work ... but is it more portable than depending on SysV shmem connection counts? ISTR that some of the platforms we support don't have Unix-style sockets at all. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]