Re: Reduced power consumption in autovacuum launcher process

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 03:12:20PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> > On 18.07.2011 18:32, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> Hmm. Well, it's not too late to rethink the WaitLatch API, if we think
> >> that that might be a significant limitation.
>
> > Right, we can easily change the timeout argument to be in milliseconds
> > instead of microseconds.
>
> On the whole I'd be more worried about giving up the shorter waits than
> the longer ones --- it's not too hard to imagine using submillisecond
> timeouts in the future, as machines get faster. If we really wanted to
> fix this, I think we need to move to a wider datatype.
>
> regards, tom lane
>

You could also tag the high bit to allow you to encode larger ranges
by having microseconds for the values with the high bit = 0 and use
milliseconds for the values with the high bit = 1. Then you could
have the best of both without punching up the width of the datatype.

Regard,
Ken