Re: TCP keepalive support for libpq

On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 1:14 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> On Tue, Jun 22, 2010 at 12:50 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>>> By that argument, we need to be programming to bare metal on every disk
>>> access.  Does anyone want to argue that depending on vendor-specific
>>> filesystem functionality is not a house of cards?  (And unfortunately,
>>> that's much too close to the truth ... but yet we're not going there.)
>
>> I think you're making my argument for me.  The file system API is far
>> more portable than the behavior we're proposing to depend on here, and
>> yet it's only arguably good enough to meet our needs.
>
> Uh, it's not API that's at issue here, and as for "not portable" I think
> you have failed to make that case. It is true that there are some old
> platforms where keepalive isn't adjustable, but I doubt that anything
> anyone is likely to be running mission-critical PG 9.0 on will lack it.

I don't think the burden of proof is on me to demonstrate that there's
a case where this feature isn't available - we're usually quite
reluctant to take advantage of platform-specific features unless we
have strong evidence that they are fully portable across our entire
set of supported platforms.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company