Re: [HACKERS] posmaster failed under high load

> On Wed, 5 May 1999, Tom Lane wrote:
>
> > Nope, that theory is all wet --- the backend definitely does
> > PS_SET_STATUS("idle") before it waits for a query. Something is
> > *really* peculiar here, since your backtrace shows that the backend
> > has reached the point of waiting for client input. It is not possible
> > to get there without having done PS_SET_STATUS. So why does the process
> > still show up as "(postmaster)" in ps? Something is flaky about your
> > system's support of ps status setting, I think.
>
> You never altered the task_struct, and so it's still 'postmaster' there.
> Note the W... the process is paged out, so the argv is not available!

Yes, I remember now. To do ps-args you need to read the process address
space. If it is paged out, ps does not bring in the pages just to read
the args. This is probably as expected. If someone wants to add a
linux-specific fix for this, I guess you could, though I am not sure it
is worth it.

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