Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> More generally, what do we think the point is of sending SIGQUIT
> rather than SIGKILL in the first place, and why does that point cease
> to be valid after 5 seconds?
Well, mostly it's about telling the client we're committing hara-kiri.
Without that, there's no very good reason to run quickdie() at all.
A practical issue with starting to send SIGKILL ourselves is that we
will no longer be able to reflexively diagnose "server process died
on signal 9" as "the linux OOM killer got you". I'm not at all
convinced that the cases where SIGQUIT doesn't work are sufficiently
common to justify losing that property.
regards, tom lane