Status of ipcclean

Started by Peter Eisentrautover 24 years ago3 messages
#1Peter Eisentraut
peter_e@gmx.net

ipcclean(1) currently says:

| ipcclean cleans up shared memory and semaphore space from aborted backends
| by deleting all instances owned by user postgres. Only the DBA should
| execute this program as it can cause bizarre behavior (i.e., crashes) if
| run during multi-user execution. This program should be executed if
| messages such as semget: No space left on device are encountered when
| starting up the postmaster or the backend server.

AFAIR, with the 7.1 release the postmaster automatically recovers from
this situation. Can someone come up with a better description of what
ipcclean is useful for, if there still is such a thing?

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net http://funkturm.homeip.net/~peter

#2Tom Lane
tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us
In reply to: Peter Eisentraut (#1)
Re: Status of ipcclean

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:

AFAIR, with the 7.1 release the postmaster automatically recovers from
this situation. Can someone come up with a better description of what
ipcclean is useful for, if there still is such a thing?

I believe that ipcclean is no longer needed for preparing to start a new
postmaster. It might possibly be useful if you wanted to clean up after
a dead postmaster that you did *not* intend to restart.

However, given the lack of portability and lack of robustness of the
script (including inability to deal with multiple-postmaster
situations), I think I'd vote for removing it altogether.

regards, tom lane

#3Peter Eisentraut
peter_e@gmx.net
In reply to: Tom Lane (#2)
Re: Status of ipcclean

Tom Lane writes:

I believe that ipcclean is no longer needed for preparing to start a new
postmaster. It might possibly be useful if you wanted to clean up after
a dead postmaster that you did *not* intend to restart.

However, given the lack of portability and lack of robustness of the
script (including inability to deal with multiple-postmaster
situations), I think I'd vote for removing it altogether.

Can other people voice their opinions what to do with ipcclean?

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net http://funkturm.homeip.net/~peter