Re: [HACKERS] Postmaster dies with many child processes

Tatsuo suggested...

Or even better, MaxBackendId can be set at the run time such as
postmaster's option. Also, it would be nice if we could monitor number
of backends currently running. Maybe we should have a new protocol for
this kind of puropose?

Oracle does this with pseudo-tables. There are about (from my memory)
15 tables, all starting with v$, that let you look into the internals
of a running oracle database. Things like mounted tablespaces, locks,
all sorts of things. One is (I think) just a name,value table for
misc parameters. There were even things like writes/second and
reads/second for performance tuning.

We did a bunch of nice tk front ends for monitoring oracle simply
by looking at the v$ tables.

Using a tables like this (pg_config, pg_backends, pg_transactions,
whatever) would be one way to provide this information.

I haven't delved into backend code enough to know if this
is possible.

-- cary