I need some help discovering the processes that run on an instance. I know that there are many processes running on one instance and they are all called postges, but I was hoping you can help me find a way to uniquely identify each one of them. I want to discover what the process name is and what the does. Let me know if you have any suggestions.
As you know, there are set of Mandatory process starts along with instance and others 'one-user-per-connection' basis called 'postgres' process (also called as 'Server Process' or 'User Process').
eg:-
-bash-4.1$ ps -ef | grep postgres
postgres 19294 1 0 01:13 ? 00:00:04 /opt/PostgreSQL/9.0/bin/postgres -D data
postgres 19295 19294 0 01:13 ? 00:00:00 postgres: logger process
postgres 19297 19294 0 01:13 ? 00:00:00 postgres: writer process
postgres 19298 19294 0 01:13 ? 00:00:00 postgres: wal writer process
postgres 19299 19294 0 01:13 ? 00:00:01 postgres: autovacuum launcher process
postgres 19301 19294 0 01:13 ? 00:00:02 postgres: stats collector process
postgres 27176 19294 1 09:25 ? 00:00:01 postgres: postgres postgres [local] SELECT
In the above example, you can see both mandatory process and user-process performing 'SELECT' operation.
To identify postgres process uniquely, you can get it from catalog view 'pg_stat_activity'.
Thanks.