I wrote: > After digging in the man page for init(8) on a couple of machines, > I realized that the SIGTERM-then-SIGKILL behavior only applies to > processes that are launched directly by init.
Actually, after further experimentation, it seems this is very platform-dependent. Current Linux (tested on Fedora 8) actually does behave in the way our code expects, ie, every process gets a SIGTERM. The default SIGTERM-to-SIGKILL delay is only 5 seconds, which is likely not enough for a checkpoint in a busy database, but at least we tried :-(. Mac OS X seems to issue everything SIGQUIT, instead of SIGTERM. I didn't experiment to see how much grace period there might be. No idea about other BSDen, though OS X's behavior might be typical. HPUX seems to go straight to SIGKILL. So the bottom line is that the best bet is to rely on an initscript's stop command to issue "pg_ctl stop -m fast", which will give us enough time to perform a clean shutdown. The other behavior is only of interest for databases that aren't controlled by an initscript known to the system. But there does seem to be some value in our designed response to SIGTERM, on at least one popular platform, so I no longer feel a need to rethink that. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly