23.3.2. Signals
Table 23.3. Signals
| Signal | Name | Category | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | SIGHUP | NORMAL | Initiate quick shutdown when shell exits while running virtuoso in foreground mode |
| 2 | SIGINT | NORMAL | User pressed CTRL-C on Virtuoso running in foreground mode to initiate normal shutdown |
| 3 | SIGQUIT | NORMAL | User pressed CTRL-\ on Virtuoso running in foreground mode to initiate quick shutdown |
| 4 | SIGILL | FAULT | Illegal instruction resulting in a program crash |
| 7 | SIGBUS | FAULT | Misaligned mem read/write resulting in a program crash |
| 8 | SIGFPE | FAULT | Divide by 0 or other arithmetical error |
| 9 | SIGKILL | SPECIAL | Terminate Virtuoso without flushing dirty pages etc. This signal should NOT be used under normal operations. |
| 11 | SIGSEGV | FAULT | Buffer/stack overrun resulting in a program crash |
| 13 | SIGPIPE | IGNORED | Other side of a pipe was killed while this side tried to write data to it |
| 15 | SIGTERM | NORMAL | Initiate quick shutdown |
Signals that are marked as NORMAL indicate that these signals can be sent by root or the owner of the virtuoso process to shutdown Virtuoso. The SIGINT and SIGQUIT signals also work when Virtuoso is running in background mode and can be used in shell scripts.
Signals that are marked as FAULT indicate an abnormal condition which should be checked. If enabled (e.g. with ulimit -c unlimited), the operating system can write a core dump allowing post-mortem debugging if the Virtuoso executable was compiled with debugging symbols.
Signals that are marked as IGNORED are handled inside Virtuoso.
The SIGTERM signal is mostly used by rc.d type shell scripts on Unix/Linux which are called during shutdown, but can also be used inside shell scripts.
The SIGKILL signal should only be used as a last resort when all other efforts to stop Virtuoso have failed.
Quick shutdown
In quick shutdown mode, Virtuoso will only flush dirty disk buffers, close transaction log and database files and exit to the operating system. Since Virtuoso does not perform a checkpoint, the next startup will take extra time as Virtuoso first needs to perform a rollback and a checkpoint before it can resume operation. The SIGTERM signal mostly used by rc.d type scripts on Unix/Linux which are called during shutdown as such instances it is better to quickly finish operations and delay the checkpoint until the next boot.
Normal shutdown
In normal shutdown mode, Virtuoso will do first do a full checkpoint, then flush dirty disk buffers, close transaction log and database files before exiting to the operating system. Depending on the size of the transaction log this can take some time. The SIGINT signal can be used in stop scripts to cleanly shutdown the database by the dba or by root.
Note that in all cases signals can only be sent by the kernel, the root user or the uid of the person who started Virtuoso. Anyone else that wants to shutdown the Virtuoso instance should use the isql program to connect to Virtuoso and run the 'shutdown' command.