PostgreSQL Processes are very few and countable like, writer process, wal writer proces,stats collector,autovacuum process,syslogger process,archiver process & daemon postmaster. If replication enabled then there will be wal sender & wal receiver process. In my trainings, I use to show process information by executing “ps -ef | grep postgres”, but how could I show the same on Solaris. So, I checked with Solaris Documentation and found its very simple and easy to get the process names as linux.

In PostgreSQL documentaion, its said to use /usr/ucb/ps with -ww options to get process names instead of regular /usr/bin/ps, however most of the information are hidden by /usr/ucb/ps option as well. Lets see how to retrieve complete postgres process names in solaris.

Below are my postgres 9.1 instance processes on Solaris:

bash-3.00$ /usr/ucb/ps -awwx | grep postgres
  7778 ?        S  0:04 /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/bin/64/postgres -D /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data
  7779 ?        S  0:01 /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/bin/64/postgres -D /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data
  7780 ?        S  0:00 /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/bin/64/postgres -D /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data
  7781 ?        S  0:00 /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/bin/64/postgres -D /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data
  7776 pts/5    S  0:00 /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/bin/64/postgres -D /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data

More extended way with pargs:

bash-3.00$  pargs `/usr/ucb/ps -awwx | grep postgres | awk '{print $1}'`
7778:   /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/bin/64/postgres -D /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data
argv[0]: postgres: writer process  
argv[1]:
argv[2]:

7779:   /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/bin/64/postgres -D /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data
argv[0]: postgres: wal writer process  
argv[1]:
argv[2]:

7780:   /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/bin/64/postgres -D /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data
argv[0]: postgres: autovacuum launcher process  
argv[1]:
argv[2]:

7781:   /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/bin/64/postgres -D /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data
argv[0]: postgres: stats collector process  
argv[1]:
argv[2]:

7776:   /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/bin/64/postgres -D /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data
argv[0]: /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/bin/64/postgres
argv[1]: -D
argv[2]: /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data

7776 is postmaster daemon process.

bash-3.00$ cat /Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data/postmaster.pid
7776
/Desktop/postgres/9.1-pgdg/data
1339917119
5432
/tmp
localhost
  5432001  50331683

Though it seems simple I believe its worth to know :).

–Raghav