Re: Using Threads?

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: The Hermit Hacker <scrappy(at)hub(dot)org>
Cc: Junfeng Zhang <junfengz(at)cae(dot)wisc(dot)edu>, pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: Using Threads?
Date: 2000-12-04 20:29:19
Message-ID: 6701.975961759@sss.pgh.pa.us
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The Hermit Hacker <scrappy(at)hub(dot)org> writes:
>> Why not use threads instead? Is that just for a
>> historical reason, or some performance/implementation concern?

> Several reasons, 'historical' probably being the strongest right now
> ... since PostgreSQL was never designed for threading, its about as
> 'un-thread-safe' as they come, and cleaning that up will/would be a
> complete nightmare (should eventually be done, mind you) ...

> The other is stability ... right now, if one backend drops away, for
> whatever reason, it doesn't take down the whole system ... if you ran
> things as one process, and that one process died, you just lost your whole
> system ...

Portability is another big reason --- using threads would create lots
of portability headaches for platforms that had no threads or an
incompatible threads library. (Not to mention buggy threads libraries,
not-quite-thread-safe libc routines, yadda yadda.)

The amount of work required looks far out of proportion to the payoff...

regards, tom lane

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