Re: kill -KILL: What happens?

On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> I'm not convinced.  I was thinking that we could simply treat it like
> SIGQUIT, if it's available.  I doubt there's a real use case for
> continuing to run queries after the postmaster and all the background
> processes are dead.  Expedited death seems like much better behavior.
> Even checking PostmasterIsAlive() once per query would be reasonable,
> except that it'd add a system call to check for a condition that
> almost never holds, which I'm not eager to do.

If postmaster has a few fds to spare, what about having it open a pipe
to every child it spawns. It never has to read/write to it, but
postmaster closing will signal the client's fd. The client just has
to pop the fd into whatever nrmal poll/select event handlign it uses
to notice when the "parent's pipe" is closed.

A FIFO would allow postmaster to not need as many file handles, and
clients reading the fifo would notice when the writer (postmaster)
closes it.

a.

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