Re: Add connection active, idle time to pg_stat_activity

On Fri, 22 Oct 2021 at 10:22, Rafia Sabih <rafia(dot)pghackers(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Hello there hackers,
>
> We at Zalando have faced some issues around long running idle
> transactions and were thinking about increasing the visibility of
> pg_stat_* views to capture them easily. What I found is that currently
> in pg_stat_activity there is a lot of good information about the
> current state of the process, but it is lacking the cumulative
> information on how much time the connection spent being idle, idle in
> transaction or active, we would like to see cumulative values for each
> of these per connection. I believe it would be helpful for us and more
> people out there if we could have total connection active and idle
> time displayed in pg_stat_activity.
>
> To provide this information I was digging into how the statistics
> collector is working and found out there is already information like
> total time that a connection is active as well as idle computed in
> pgstat_report_activity[1]. Ideally, this would be the values we would
> like to see per process in pg_stat_activity.
>
> Curious to know your thoughts on this.
>
> [1]https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/cd3f429d9565b2e5caf0980ea7c707e37bc3b317/src/backend/utils/activity/backend_status.c#L593
>
>
>
> --
> Regards,
> Rafia Sabih

Please find the attached patch for the idea of our intentions.
It basically adds three attributes for idle, idle_in_transaction, and
active time respectively.
Please let me know your views on this and I shall add this to the
upcoming commitfest for better tracking.

--
Regards,
Rafia Sabih