[Pgpool-general] killing pgpool backends?

[Glyn Astill]

Hi chaps,

We have some windows telnet servers that occasionally get zombified processes that we can't kill without a reboot, and it's not always convenient to reboot them.

Sometimes these zombified processes have a connection into our pgpool with an open transaction. Pgpool and postgres are on Linux servers.

i.e. on the pool server we see

14535 ?        S      0:00 pgpool: ash_ask TEMP 192.168.1.94(4803) idle in transaction

and on the pg server 

29362 ?        Ss     0:00 postgres: ash_ask TEMP 192.168.1.98(55616) idle in transaction

What's the best way to get rid of that connection into the postgres server?

A pg_cancel_backend returns true but doesn't actually get rid of the postgres backend, so up to now I've just been kill -9'ing the pgpool backend for that user, and that sorts it out - the zombie process is still there on the telnet server but it doesn't reconnect.

Is there any chance this could cause me a problem? and is there a better way?

Thanks
Glyn