Re: libpq v17 PQsocketPoll timeout is not granular enough

Dominique Devienne <ddevienne(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> PQsocketPoll() being based on time_t, it has only second resolution, AFAIK.
> Despite the [underlying implementation in fe-misc.c][2] supporting at
> least milliseconds.
> ...
> But I think it would a pity if that unreleased API couldn't be made to
> accomodate sub-second timeouts and more use-cases, like above.
> Especially given that libpq v17 isn't out yet. I may come late to the
> game, but hopefully it is not too late.

This is an interesting suggestion, but I think yes it's too late.
We're already past beta1 and this'd require some fairly fundamental
rethinking, since there's no easy substitute for type time_t that has
millisecond resolution. (The callers do want to specify an end time
not a timeout interval, since some of them loop around PQsocketPoll
and don't want the end time to slip.)

I guess conceivably we could use gettimeofday() and struct timeval
instead of time() and time_t, but it'd touch a lot of places in
libpq and it'd make some of the calculations a lot more complex.

Maybe a better idea would be to convert to using our
src/include/portability/instr_time.h abstraction? But that
would be problematic for outside callers.

In any case this doesn't seem like a sane thing to be redesigning
post-beta. A few months ago maybe we'd have done it, but ...

regards, tom lane