On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 10:52 AM, Michael Banck <michael.ba...@credativ.de> wrote:
> Hi, > > Am Samstag, den 04.10.2014, 15:05 -0500 schrieb Jim Nasby: > > On 10/4/14, 1:21 PM, Jeff Janes wrote: > > > On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 6:21 AM, Michael Banck wrote: > > > we have seen repeatedly that users can be confused about why > PostgreSQL > > > is not shutting down even though they requested it. Usually, this > is > > > because `log_checkpoints' is not enabled and the final checkpoint > is > > > being written, delaying shutdown. As no message besides "shutting > down" > > > is written to the server log in this case, we even had users > believing > > > the server was hanging and pondering killing it manually. > > > > > > > >> Wouldn't a better place to write this message be the terminal from > >> which "pg_ctl stop" was invoked, rather than the server log file? > > Looking at it from a DBA perspective, this would indeed be better, yes. > > However, I see a few issues with that: > > 1. If you are using an init script (or another wrapper around pg_ctl), > you don't get any of its output it seems. > > 2. Having taken a quick look at pg_ctl, it seems to just kill the > postmaster on shutdown and wait for its PID file to disappear. I don't > see how it should figure out that PostgreSQL is waiting for a checkpoint > to be finished? > It could just print out a reminder that a checkpoint will occur, depending on what mode of shutdown was requested. I don't think this reminder has be validated by the server itself, the intention should be enough. Most people who don't know that a clean shutdown inherently involves a checkpoint probably don't monitor the server log closely, either. Of course if they use packager scripts to do the shutdown and those scripts don't pass along the message, I guess that still doesn't help. Cheers, Jeff
