Previously, if the server being monitored was not available, repmgrd
would always close the existing connection handle and open a new one.
However, in some cases, e.g. a brief network outage, the existing
connection handle is still good and does not need to be reopened.
This could be particularly problematic if monitoring_history is on,
as this risks leaving orphan sessions on the primary which (given
a sufficiently unstable network) could lead to all available backends
being occupied.
Instead, during an outage we now use a new connection to verify
the server is accessible; if the old connection is still available
(e.g. following a short network interruption) we continue using that;
if not (e.g. the server was restarted), we use the new one.
Traditionally repmgrd will only write a pidfile if explicitly requested with
-p/--pid-file. However it's normally desirable to have a pidfile, and it's
preferable to have one used by default to prevent accidentally starting a second
repmgrd instance.
Following changes made:
- add configuration file parameter "repmgrd_pid_file" (initially overridden by
-p/--pid-file for backwards compatibility, though eventually we'll want to
drop -p/--pid-file altogether)
- add command line option --no-pid-file
- if neither "repmgrd_pid_file" nor -p/--pid-file is set, create the pid file
in a temporary directory
Implements GitHub #457.
This will cover both the case when an entire node including
repmgrd goes down, and when one PostgreSQL instance goes down
but repmgrd is still up (in which case only one of the repmgrds
will handle the failover).
