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authorTom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>2009-05-05 19:59:00 +0000
committerTom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>2009-05-05 19:59:00 +0000
commit969d7cd4315bfe30aed5221b69ee34e7cd132789 (patch)
tree958e2b4b6332c01c0e2adee52a79653e5c588a13 /src/backend/commands/dbcommands.c
parent8f348112f35d9dcc28fc575f8bae458883c5700a (diff)
downloadpostgresql-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.
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