On Tue, 2005-06-21 at 23:34 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes: > > Tom Lane wrote: > >> In any case the correct way to solve the problem is to find out what's > >> being left corrupt by SIGTERM, rather than install more messiness in > >> order to avoid facing the real issue ... > > > I am confused. Are you talking about the client SIGTERM or the server? > > I am talking about Rod Taylor's reports that SIGTERM'ing individual > backends tends to lead to "lock table corrupted" crashes awhile later. > Now, I've been playing the part of Chicken Little on this for awhile, > but seeing an actual report of problems from the field certainly > strengthens my feelings about it.
Bringing this thread back to life. I have not seen a lock table corruption issue with SIGTERM in 8.1 on Solaris/Sun IV, Linux/AMD64, or Linux/Intel. I don't recall seeing one on 8.0.3 either though I'm pretty sure there were several on 8.0.1. There are times when locks for a process hang around for a few minutes before getting cleared. I don't recall whether they were ungranted table locks or entries waiting on a transaction ID lock, but the source was Slony and a large pg_listener structure with more than 20000 pages (yes, pages not tuples). I have also seen processes refusing to acknowledge the signal and exit during btree index builds, but that's not a data corruption issue. -- ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match