C
ChUIMonster
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The original post that we were talking about is regarding a situation in someone's development environment. I agree that bad habits can start there but I think it is a bit of a leap in this case. Roughly 30 years ago I found this whole thing very annoying too. I made some bold statements about how it should be done differently to some guy named "gus" on PEG. I am hoping that those posts have all been lost to the ages but he was remarkably patient with me. I did eventually learn a few things about why it is the way that it is and I especially learned about the things that I should have known better than to be doing. I stopped doing that stuff. You are also quite right -- Progress is going to be blamed. That hasn't changed in 30+ years and it probably never will change. None the less - It isn't reasonable for a "sys admin" to look at "kill -9" as the cure all for all problems. Those are the sys admins with the especially unfortunate bad habits. Another one of those bad habits is deciding that a process "needs to be terminated" all too casually. An awful lot of processes that offend people's sensibilities are doing no harm and should be simply left alone. If your sys admin thinks that kill -9 "always works" or words to that effect you should not blame Progress -- you need a new sys admin. If you cannot educate that sys admin then there are almost certainly lots of other things that they have been up to that will need to be fixed. You probably want to start by taking all of that person's shell scripts out into the desert and burning them. Following the recommended procedure to disconnect a shared memory client is not analogous to to killing a shared memory client with "kill -9". "Kill -9" is swatting a fly with a truck. It is the completely wrong tool for the job and it *will* break things. But it will not, by itself, corrupt your database. (For the record -- once in a very great while we do run into situations where the recommended procedure fails and the process cannot be cleanly disconnected. In almost all cases we decide to allow the problematic process to stay attached until we have a "quiet time" or maintenance window available. It is not an everyday occurrence. It happens much less than monthly across our customer base and some of those customers are very, very large and active. So far as I can recall we have resorted to a daytime "kill -9" once in the last 2 or 3 years. And I don't remember the time before that.) I also certainly agree that more effort should go into educating people not to use "kill -9" or taskmgr (which is basically the same thing in Windows land) and that the fallout when someone does do that should be better handled. One really good place to start should be making the .lg file messages surrounding such events a whole lot clearer. Another good idea would be to create a dedicated tool for disconnecting sessions that explains the options and the pros and cons of the internal options as well as the consequences of the external options. Make it easier for people to do the right thing. Don't hide it in options to tools that sound very much like the wrong thing to be doing.
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