Re: add recovery, backup, archive, streaming etc. activity messages to server logs along with ps display

On Wed, Nov 10, 2021, at 2:38 PM, Bharath Rupireddy wrote:
> As discussed in [1], isn't it a better idea to add some of activity
> messages [2] such as recovery, archive, backup, streaming etc. to
> server logs at LOG level? They are currently being set into ps display
> which is good if the postgres is being run on a standalone box/VM
> where users can see the ps display, but it doesn't help much in case
> the postgres is being run on a cloud environment where users don't
> have access to ps display output. Moreover, the ps display is
> transient and will not help to analyze after an issue occurs.
Besides recovery, the other activities already provide information through
views. I might be missing something but it seems the current views already
provide the information that ps displays.

> Having the above messages in the server logs will be useful to
> understand how the system is/was doing/progressing with these
> (sometimes time-intensive) operations.
It could be useful for a root cause analysis, however, you are also increasing
the number of LOG messages in a system that doesn't/won't require such
information. It is fine to add additional DEBUG messages if there isn't a
similar one yet. If at least the message level were module-controlled, you
could modify a setting to gather more messages from a specific module.
Unfortunately, that's not possible so we should avoid superfluous messages.

--
Euler Taveira
EDB https://www.enterprisedb.com/