Re: How to kill process "idle in transaction"

["Scott Marlowe" <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com>]

On 10/30/07, Achilleas Mantzios <achill(at)matrix(dot)gatewaynet(dot)com> wrote:
> Στις Τρίτη 30 Οκτώβριος 2007 10:45, ο/η Patrick De Zlio έγραψε:
> > Hi,
> >
> > We are running PostgreSQL 8.2.4 with quite highly updated millions rows
> > tables.
> >
> > It comes sometimes to get some "idle in transaction" processes, which
> > doesn't have first really viewable effect out of giving very bad estimated
> > numbers for pgclass.reltuples and, if we let them run as it is, block the
> > autovacuum from releasing rows, and after few days some worse problems.
> >
> > Now we are able to detect these "idle in transaction" processes, but what
> > to do with them ?
> >
> > What to do to avoid such situation? How to find the bad request which put
> > the process in this state? From the time it is idle in transaction, we
> > can't see the query in the pg_lock table anymore.
> >
> > How to deal with such process when it is already idle in transaction? can
> > we simply kill it? It is a backend from pgpool. Can we simply restart it
> > (how) without restarting all the database?
>
> Some connection pools issue a BEGIN on the connection just
> after the previous user of the connection issues COMMIT and
> then closes it (Jboss does it). So, <IDLE> in transaction is not
> apriori bad.

You can turn off that behaviour, IIRC.  It is broken behaviour as far
as pgsql is concerned, I believe.