Re: Should rename "startup process" to something else?

On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 12:24 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Being hackers ourselves, I'm not sure we're qualified to opine on
> that. I cannot say that I've noticed any questions about it on
> the mailing lists, though.

What I've noticed when supporting EDB customer is that if, say,
there's a problem with recovery, and they're trying to figure out
which process is responsible, they have no intuition that the startup
process is the likely culprit. They could, for example, notice whether
the LSN that shows up in the ps status is advancing over time. Or,
they could notice whether that process is doing a lot of I/O, or a lot
of CPU. But since they have no notion that a startup process has
anything to do with recovery, they don't make that connection. Now you
can argue that I ought to be happy about that because, hey, it's job
security. And you can also argue that even if the process had a better
name, a lot of people wouldn't figure it out for one reason or
another. However, my view is that we do well to make things more
comprehensible when we can.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com