Re: Threaded PosgreSQL server

On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Haroldo Stenger wrote:

>
>
> Brian Bruns wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Haroldo Stenger wrote:
> >
> > > > > that mutating PG thread safe, will slow down a 7.3 release a lot,
> > > > > something not wanted by many here.
> > > >
> > > > Depends on how it is handled ...
> > >
> > > How do you see it not slowing down, when key developers said their view is that
> > > multithreading will pose a major obstacle? Are you envisioning any special
> > > approach not already talked about?
> >
> > Excuse my butting in, but it large part we are talking about changing
> > things like:
> >
> > if (PqSomeStaticOrGlobalVariable) { ... }
> >
> > to
> >
> > if (MyPort->PqSomeVariable) { ... }
> >
> > converting to thread safety should not, at least for this kind of low
> > hanging fruit, have any negative performance impact. And from my vantage
> > point it takes out a whole lot of "where did that come from and who set it
> > when?" kinda questions when reading the code. Of course I'm just getting
> > my feet wet so feel free to correct my first impressions.
>
> Just that when I said "will slow down a 7.3 release a lot", I was referring to
> *the date of the release*, not its inherent performance, the code to be
> multi-threaded or not. It was a software engineering sort of consideration.

Again, if we go at it as 'threaded for v7.3', then most probably ... but I
would not allow that to happen, nor would any of the *core* developers ...
what I am, and have been, advocating is starting down the 'thread-safe'
path ... as has actually been discussed before, there are sections of
PostgreSQL that could make use of threading without the whole system
*being* threaded ... stuff that, right now, are done sequentially that
could be done in parralel if threading was available ...