Re: idle_in_transaction_timeout

On 06/03/2014 02:53 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
>> Out of curiosity, how much harder would it have been just to abort the
>> transaction? I think breaking the connection is probably the right
>> behavior, but before folks start arguing it out, I wanted to know if
>> aborting the transaction is even a reasonable thing to do.
>
> FWIW, I think aborting the transaction is probably better, especially
> if the patch is designed to do nothing to already-aborted transactions.
> If the client is still there, it will see the abort as a failure in its
> next query, which is less likely to confuse it completely than a
> connection loss. (I think, anyway.)

Personally, I think we'll get about equal amounts of confusion either way.

> The argument that we might want to close the connection to free up
> connection slots doesn't seem to me to hold water as long as we allow
> a client that *isn't* inside a transaction to sit on an idle connection
> forever. Perhaps there is room for a second timeout that limits how
> long you can sit idle independently of being in a transaction, but that
> isn't this patch.

Like I said, I'm marginally in favor of terminating the connection, but
I'd be completely satisfied with a timeout which aborted the transaction
instead. Assuming that change doesn't derail this patch and keep it
from getting into 9.5, of course.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com