pgterminate

Terminates active and idle PostgreSQL backends

Did you encountered long-running queries locking down your entire company system because of a massive lock on the database? Or a scatterbrained developper connected to the production database with an open transaction leading to a production outage? Never? Really? Either you have very good policies and that's awesome, or you don't work in databases at all.

With pgterminate, you shouldn't be paged at night because some queries has locked down production for too long. It looks after "active" and "idle" connections and terminate them. As simple as that.

Highlights

• pgterminate name is derived from pg_terminate_backend function, it terminates backends.
• backends are called sessions in pgterminate.
• active sessions are backends in active state for more than active-timeout seconds.
• idle sessions are backends in idle, idle in transaction or idle in transaction (abort) state for more than idle-timeout seconds.
• at least one of active-timeout and idle-timeout parameter is required, both can be used.
• pgterminate relies on libpq for PostgreSQL connection. When -host is ommited, connection via unix socket is used. When -user is ommited, the unix user is used. And so on.
• time parameters, like connect-timeout, active-timeout, idle-timeout and interval, are represented in seconds. They accept float value except for connect-timeout which is an integer.
• if you want pgterminate to terminate any session, ensure it has SUPERUSER privileges.

Internals

Signals

pgterminate handles the following OS signals:

• SIGINT, SIGTERM to gracefully terminates the infinite loop
• SIGHUP to reload configuration file and re-open log file if used (handy for logrotate)

Configuration

There's two ways to configure pgterminate:

• command-line arguments
• configuration file with -config command-line argument

Configuration file options override command-line arguments

Usage

Connect to a remote instance and prompt for password:

pgterminate -host 10.0.0.1 -port 5432 -user test -prompt-password -database test

Use a configuration file:

pgterminate -config config.yaml

Use both configuration file and command-line arguments:

pgterminate -config config.yaml -interval 0.25 -active-timeout 10 -idle-timeout 300

Print usage:

pgterminate -help

Filtering users

pgterminate is able to include or exclude users from being terminated.

Configuration

List

Arguments -include-user or -exclude-user can be used multiple times for multiple users:

pgterminate -include-user user1 -include-user user2

Or in configuration file:

include-users:
  user1
  user2

Same applies for -exclude-user (argument) and exclude-users (file).

Regexes

Regexes can be configured:

pgterminate -include-users-regex "(user1|user2)"

Or in configuration file:

include-users-regex: "(user1|user2)"

Same applies for -exclude-users-regex (argument) and exclude-users-regex (file).

Include users

When include users list or regex is set, pgterminate will focus on included users only. It could terminate excluded users if any. If you want to exclude users, use exclude options only.

Exclude users

When exclude users list or regex is set and no include option is set, pgterminate will terminate all sessions except excluded users.

License

pgterminate is released under The Unlicense license. Code is under public domain.