Re: kill -KILL: What happens?

On Jan13, 2011, at 21:01 , Aidan Van Dyk wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.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.

I just started to experiment with that idea, and wrote a small test
program to check if that'd work. I'll post the results when I'm done.

best regards,
Florian Pflug