David Fetter <da...@fetter.org> writes: > On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 10:41:28AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote: >> It's just that you're then looking at having to manually clean up the >> child processes and then restart the postmaster; a process that is not >> only tedious but does offer the possibility of screwing yourself.
> Does this mean that there's no cross-platform way to ensure that > killing a process results in its children's timely (i.e. before damage > can occur) death? That such a way isn't practical from a performance > point of view? The simple, easy, cross-platform solution is this: don't kill -9 the postmaster. Send it one of the provisioned shutdown signals and let it kill its children for you. At least on Unix I don't believe there is any other solution. You could try looking at ps output but there's a fundamental race condition, ie the postmaster could spawn another child just before you kill it, whereupon the child is reassigned to init and there's no longer a good way to tell that it came from that postmaster. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers