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author | Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> | 2009-05-05 19:59:00 +0000 |
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committer | Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> | 2009-05-05 19:59:00 +0000 |
commit | 969d7cd4315bfe30aed5221b69ee34e7cd132789 (patch) | |
tree | 958e2b4b6332c01c0e2adee52a79653e5c588a13 /src/backend/commands/dbcommands.c | |
parent | 8f348112f35d9dcc28fc575f8bae458883c5700a (diff) | |
download | postgresql-969d7cd4315bfe30aed5221b69ee34e7cd132789.tar.gz postgresql-969d7cd4315bfe30aed5221b69ee34e7cd132789.zip |
Install a "dead man switch" to allow the postmaster to detect cases where
a backend has done exit(0) or exit(1) without having disengaged itself
from shared memory. We are at risk for this whenever third-party code is
loaded into a backend, since such code might not know it's supposed to go
through proc_exit() instead. Also, it is reported that under Windows
there are ways to externally kill a process that cause the status code
returned to the postmaster to be indistinguishable from a voluntary exit
(thank you, Microsoft). If this does happen then the system is probably
hosed --- for instance, the dead session might still be holding locks.
So the best recovery method is to treat this like a backend crash.
The dead man switch is armed for a particular child process when it
acquires a regular PGPROC, and disarmed when the PGPROC is released;
these should be the first and last touches of shared memory resources
in a backend, or close enough anyway. This choice means there is no
coverage for auxiliary processes, but I doubt we need that, since they
shouldn't be executing any user-provided code anyway.
This patch also improves the management of the EXEC_BACKEND
ShmemBackendArray array a bit, by reducing search costs.
Although this problem is of long standing, the lack of field complaints
seems to mean it's not critical enough to risk back-patching; at least
not till we get some more testing of this mechanism.
Diffstat (limited to 'src/backend/commands/dbcommands.c')
0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions