Re: Request: pg_cancel_backend variant that handles 'idle in transaction' sessions

* Joshua D. Drake (jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com) wrote:
> On 11/04/2015 01:55 PM, Stephen Frost wrote:
> >* Joe Conway (mail(at)joeconway(dot)com) wrote:
> >>On 11/04/2015 01:24 PM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> >>>I agree with Pavel. Having a transaction timeout just does not make any
> >>>sense. I can see absolutely no use for it. An idle-in-transaction
> >>>timeout, on the other hand, is very useful.
> >>
> >>+1 -- agreed
> >
> >I'm not sure of that. I can certainly see a use for transaction
> >timeouts- after all, they hold locks and can be very disruptive in the
> >long run. Further, there are cases where a transaction is normally very
> >fast and in a corner case it becomes extremely slow and disruptive to
> >the rest of the system. In those cases, having a timeout for it is
> >valuable.
>
> Yeah but anything holding a lock that long can be terminated via
> statement_timeout can it not?

Well, no? statement_timeout is per-statement, while transaction_timeout
is, well, per transaction. If there's a process which is going and has
an open transaction and it's holding locks, that can be an issue.

To be frank, my gut feeling is that transaction_timeout is actually more
useful than statement_timeout.

Thanks!

Stephen