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You are correct! TIL, and thank you. Connection processes get a SIGQUIT, shared buffers cleared, and WAL replayed, but postmaster stays alive. It's effectively an online restart.

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I’d be very curious to hear what an online restart approach for sketchy extensions crashing a shared thread per connection process might look like. This is more a question for the author of the project but I’m curious if they have plans in that direction.

systems, upstart or even simple primitive script wrapper.

Built-in is also possible: just fork once after start, and you have parent as watchdog and restarter.

What's online about this restart? Just that the tcp port keeps listening? I assume all running transaction will have to be aborted, right? And connections dropped?

The postmaster is effectively your supervisor. It could see the child segfault and abort the whole DB, but that would be deferring supervision to your init system. Not ideal.

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