Re: when the startup process doesn't

On Mon, Apr 19, 2021 at 01:55:13PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> I've noticed that customers not infrequently complain that they start
> postgres and then the system doesn't come up for a while and they have
> no idea what's going on and are (understandably) worried. There are
> probably a number of reasons why this can happen, but the ones that
> seem to come up most often in my experience are (1) SyncDataDirectory
> takes a long time, (b) ResetUnloggedRelations takes a long time, and
> (c) there's a lot of WAL to apply so that takes a long time. It's
> possible to distinguish this last case from the other two by looking
> at the output of 'ps', but that's not super-convenient if your normal
> method of access to the server is via libpq, and it only works if you
> are monitoring it as it's happening rather than looking at the logs
> after-the-fact. I am not sure there's any real way to distinguish the
> other two cases without using strace or gdb or similar.
> 
> It seems to me that we could do better. One approach would be to try
> to issue a log message periodically - maybe once per minute, or some
> configurable interval, e.g. perhaps add messages something like this:

Yes, this certainly needs improvement.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        https://momjian.us
  EDB                                      https://enterprisedb.com

  If only the physical world exists, free will is an illusion.