Re: Printing backtrace of postgres processes

Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> On 2021-05-06 14:38:51 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>> On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 2:30 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> This point is entirely separate from the question of whether
>>> triggering stack traces at inopportune moments could cause system
>>> malfunctions, but that question is also not to be ignored.

> I think that ship kind of has sailed with
>
> commit 71a8a4f6e36547bb060dbcc961ea9b57420f7190
> Author: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org>
> Date: 2019-11-08 15:44:20 -0300
> Add backtrace support for error reporting

The fact that we have a scarily large surface area for that to
cause problems is not a great argument for making the surface
area even larger. Also, I don't think v13 has been out long
enough for us to have full confidence that the backtrace behavior
doesn't cause any problems already.

> we allow generating backtraces in all kind of places, including
> e.g. some inside critical sections via backtrace_functions.

If there's an elog call inside a critical section, that seems
like a problem already. Are you sure that there are any such?

regards, tom lane