Re: pg_background (and more parallelism infrastructure patches)

Robert,

* Robert Haas (robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
> Attached is a contrib module that lets you launch arbitrary command in
> a background worker, and supporting infrastructure patches for core.

Very cool! Started looking into this while waiting on a few
CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS runs to finish (ugh...).

Perhaps I'm just being a bit over the top, but all this per-character
work feels a bit ridiculous.. When we're using MAXIMUM_ALIGNOF, I
suppose it's not so bad, but is there no hope to increase that and make
this whole process more efficient? Just a thought.

After reading through the code for 0001, I decided to actually take it
out for a spin- see attached. I then passed a few megabytes of data
through it and it seemed to work just fine.

In general, I'm quite excited about this capability and will be looking
over the later patches also. I also prefer the function-pointer based
approach which was taken up in later versions to the hook-based approach
in the initial patches, so glad to see things going in that direction.
Lastly, I will say that I feel it'd be good to support bi-directional
communication as I think it'll be needed eventually, but I'm not sure
that has to happen now.

Thanks!

Stephen