Re: Let's make PostgreSQL multi-threaded

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.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB:https://www.enterprisedb.com