Re: silent_mode and LINUX_OOM_ADJ

Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>

From: Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>
To: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>
Cc: Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Peter Geoghegan <peter@2ndquadrant.com>
Date: 2011-06-27T07:23:41Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 16:37, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote:
> Excerpts from Heikki Linnakangas's message of vie jun 24 07:01:57 -0400 2011:
>> While reviewing Peter Geoghegan's postmaster death patch, I noticed that
>> if you turn on silent_mode, the LINUX_OOM_ADJ code in fork_process()
>> runs when postmaster forks itself into background. That re-enables the
>> OOM killer in postmaster, if you've disabled it in the startup script by
>> adjusting /proc/self/oom_adj. That seems like a bug, albeit a pretty
>> minor one.
>>
>> This may be a dumb question, but what is the purpose of silent_mode?
>> Can't you just use nohup?
>
> I think silent_mode is an artifact from when our daemon handling in
> general was a lot more primitive (I bet there wasn't even pg_ctl then).
> Maybe we could discuss removing it altogether.

If I'm not entirely mistaken, it's on by default in SuSE RPMs. I don't
have a box with access right now, but I've come across it a couple of
times recently with clients, and I think that's how it is. Might want
to doublecheck with the suse maintainer if there's a particular reason
they do that...


-- 
 Magnus Hagander
 Me: http://www.hagander.net/
 Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/