Re: Interruptible sleeps (was Re: CommitFest 2009-07: Yay, Kevin! Thanks, reviewers!)

Tom Lane wrote:
> Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > Tom Lane wrote:
> >> Well, yes they are. They cause unnecessary process wakeups and thereby
> >> consume cycles even when the database is idle. See for example a
> >> longstanding complaint here:
> >> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=252129
>
> > ... The only clear case where this is
> > always a win is when the system it totally idle.
>
> If you'll climb down off that horse for a moment: yeah, the idle case is
> *exactly* what they're complaining about. In particular, the complaint
> is that it's unreasonable to have Postgres running on a machine at all
> unless it's actively being used, because it forces significant CPU power
> drain anyway. That gets in the way of our plan for world domination,
> no? If you can't have a PG sitting unobtrusively in the background,
> waiting for you to have a need for it, it won't get installed in the
> first place. People will pick mysql, or something else with a smaller
> footprint, to put on their laptops, and then we lose some more mindshare.
> I see this as just another facet of the argument about whether it's okay
> to have default settings that try to take over the entire machine.

FYI, last week I was running PG 8.4.X with default settings on a T43
laptop running XP with 1 Gig of RAM and it caused a racing game I was
playing to run jerkily. When I shut down the Postgres server, the
problem was fixed. I was kind of surprised that an idle PG server could
cause that.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +