Re: Let's make PostgreSQL multi-threaded

On 6/5/23 14:51, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> On 2023-06-05 Mo 11:18, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Heikki Linnakangas<hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> writes:
>>> I spoke with some folks at PGCon about making PostgreSQL multi-threaded,
>>> so that the whole server runs in a single process, with multiple
>>> threads. It has been discussed many times in the past, last thread on
>>> pgsql-hackers was back in 2017 when Konstantin made some experiments [0].
>>> I feel that there is now pretty strong consensus that it would be a good
>>> thing, more so than before. Lots of work to get there, and lots of
>>> details to be hashed out, but no objections to the idea at a high level.
>>> The purpose of this email is to make that silent consensus explicit. If
>>> you have objections to switching from the current multi-process
>>> architecture to a single-process, multi-threaded architecture, please
>>> speak up.
>> For the record, I think this will be a disaster. There is far too much
>> code that will get broken, largely silently, and much of it is not
>> under our control.
>
> If we were starting out today we would probably choose a threaded
> implementation. But moving to threaded now seems to me like a
> multi-year-multi-person project with the prospect of years to come
> chasing bugs and the prospect of fairly modest advantages. The risk to
> reward doesn't look great.
>
> That's my initial reaction. I could be convinced otherwise.

I read through the thread thus far, and Andrew's response is the one
that best aligns with my reaction.

--
Joe Conway
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
RDS Open Source Databases
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com