Hi, Currently the systemd file in the documentation does not specify a restart policy. By default systemd will not attempt to restart a service that has failed (killed by OOM-killer for example) [0]. The systemd docs recommends "Setting this to on-failure is the recommended choice for long-running services, in order to increase reliability by attempting automatic recovery from errors." I think that Postgres is probably a good example of a "long-running service". Pgbouncer for example also uses "Restart=on-failure" [1].
Wondering also if there are any factors that I am not considering here. Perhaps if this is the case that this is not good blanket guidance, it would be worth it to provide some guidance around Restart systemd parameter in the postgres docs. [0] https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd.service.html [1] https://github.com/pgbouncer/pgbouncer/blob/master/etc/pgbouncer.service Thanks, Andrew Jackson
From 9a0885ecfccbe69d6704d0c0d69347ccc23cdddb Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Andrew Jackson <[email protected]> Date: Thu, 27 Nov 2025 10:45:52 -0600 Subject: [PATCH] doc: Add restart on failure to example systemd file The documentation previously had a systemd unit file that would not attempt to recover from process failures such as OOM's, segfaults, etc. This commit adds `Restart=on-failure` which tells systemd to attempt to restart the process after failure. This is the recommended configuration per the systemd documentation: "Setting this to on-failure is the recommended choice for long-running services". Most postgres users will simply copy/paste what the postgres docs recommend and will probably do their own research and change the service file to restart on failure, so might as well set this as the default in the postgres docs. --- doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml index 0c60bafac63..dbb3b2ef53f 100644 --- a/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml +++ b/doc/src/sgml/runtime.sgml @@ -491,6 +491,7 @@ ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID KillMode=mixed KillSignal=SIGINT TimeoutSec=infinity +Restart=on-failure [Install] WantedBy=multi-user.target -- 2.49.0
