Re: POC: Carefully exposing information without authentication

On Fri, May 30, 2025 at 11:02 AM Antonin Houska <ah(at)cybertec(dot)at> wrote:

> Why is it important not to fork?

Good question. Forking is expensive, and there is also a lot of
housekeeping associated with it that is simply not needed here. We want
this to be lightweight, and simple. No need to fork if we are just going to
do a few strncmp() calls and a send(). However, I'm not highly opposed to
fork-first, as I understand that we want to not slow down postmaster. My
testing showed a barely measurable impact, but I will defer to whatever
decision the elder Postgres gods decide on.

> My understanding is that pg_is_ready also tries to start a regular
> connection, i.e. forks a new backend.

Yep. I consider pg_isready a spiritual cousin to this feature, but it's not
something that can really do what this does.

Cheers,
Greg

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