Improve tests for postmaster death in auxiliary processes.

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

Commit: fd71421b0187de0e2bf76ff66b4a9433bd96c4a0
Author: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 2012-05-10T04:54:56Z
Releases: 9.2.0
Improve tests for postmaster death in auxiliary processes.

In checkpointer and walwriter, avoid calling PostmasterIsAlive unless
WaitLatch has reported WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH.  This saves a kernel call per
iteration of the process's outer loop, which is not all that much, but a
cycle shaved is a cycle earned.  I had already removed the unconditional
PostmasterIsAlive calls in bgwriter and pgstat in previous patches, but
forgot that WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH is supposed to be treated as untrustworthy
(per comment in unix_latch.c); so adjust those two cases to match.

There are a few other places where the same idea might be applied, but only
after substantial code rearrangement, so I didn't bother.

Files