Re: [HACKERS] parallel.c oblivion of worker-startup failures

On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 9:38 PM, Amit Kapila <amit(dot)kapila16(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 24, 2018 at 10:38 AM, Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)bowt(dot)ie> wrote:
>> The leader can go ahead and sort before calling something like a new
>> WaitForParallelWorkersToAttach() function (or even
>> WaitForParallelWorkersToFinish()). If we did add a
>> WaitForParallelWorkersToAttach() function, then the performance hit
>> would probably not be noticeable in practice. The
>> parallel_leader_participates case would still work without special
>> care (that's the main hazard that makes using a barrier seem
>> unappealing).
>>
>
> +1. I also think so. Another advantage is that even if one of the
> workers is not able to start, we don't need to return an error at the
> end of the query, rather we can detect that situation early and can
> execute the query successfully. OTOH, if we are not convinced about
> performance implications, then WaitForParallelWorkersToFinish should
> serve the purpose which can be called at later point of time.

There is another disadvantage to just using
WaitForParallelWorkersToFinish() to wait for nbtsort.c workers to
finish (and not inventing a WaitForParallelWorkersToAttach() function,
and calling that instead), which is: there can be no custom wait event
that specifically mentions parallel CREATE INDEX.

--
Peter Geoghegan