> I am new to postgreSQL. When I read the documents, I find out the Postmaster
> daemon actual spawns a new backend server process to serve a new client
> request. Why not use threads instead? Is that just for a historical reason,
> or some performance/implementation concern?

Both. Not all systems supported by PostgreSQL have a standards-compliant
threading implementation (even more true for the systems PostgreSQL has
supported over the years).

But there are performance and reliability considerations too. A
thread-only server is likely more brittle than a process-per-client
implementation, since all threads share the same address space.
Corruption in one server might more easily propagate to other servers.

The time to start a backend is quite often small compared to the time
required for a complete session, so imho the differences in absolute
speed are not generally significant.

                       - Thomas

In response to

• Using Threads? at 2000-11-28 05:42:24 from Junfeng Zhang

Responses

• Re: Using Threads? at 2000-12-04 15:31:14 from Junfeng Zhang

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