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250108b6f3
pg_ctl start with -w previously relied on a heuristic that the postmaster would surely always manage to create postmaster.pid within five seconds. Unfortunately, that fails much more often than we would like on some of the slower, more heavily loaded buildfarm members. We have known for quite some time that we could remove the need for that heuristic on Unix by using fork/exec instead of system() to launch the postmaster. This allows us to know the exact PID of the postmaster, which allows near-certain verification that the postmaster.pid file is the one we want and not a leftover, and it also lets us use waitpid() to detect reliably whether the child postmaster has exited or not. What was blocking this change was not wanting to rewrite the Windows version of start_postmaster() to avoid use of CMD.EXE. That's doable in theory but would require fooling about with stdout/stderr redirection, and getting the handling of quote-containing postmaster switches to stay the same might be rather ticklish. However, we realized that we don't have to do that to fix the problem, because we can test whether the shell process has exited as a proxy for whether the postmaster is still alive. That doesn't allow an exact check of the PID in postmaster.pid, but we're no worse off than before in that respect; and we do get to get rid of the heuristic about how long the postmaster might take to create postmaster.pid. On Unix, this change means that a second "pg_ctl start -w" immediately after another such command will now reliably fail, whereas previously it would succeed if done within two seconds of the earlier command. Since that's a saner behavior anyway, it's fine. On Windows, the case can still succeed within the same time window, since pg_ctl can't tell that the earlier postmaster's postmaster.pid isn't the pidfile it is looking for. To ensure stable test results on Windows, we can insert a short sleep into the test script for pg_ctl, ensuring that the existing pidfile looks stale. This hack can be removed if we ever do rewrite start_postmaster(), but that no longer seems like a high-priority thing to do. Back-patch to all supported versions, both because the current behavior is buggy and because we must do that if we want the buildfarm failures to go away. Tom Lane and Michael Paquier |
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| initdb | ||
| pg_basebackup | ||
| pg_config | ||
| pg_controldata | ||
| pg_ctl | ||
| pg_dump | ||
| pg_resetxlog | ||
| pgevent | ||
| psql | ||
| scripts | ||
| Makefile | ||