Re: autovacuum launcher using InitPostgres

Hi,

Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
>> The user may not care about the difference, but there's a point in
>> having the limit be the simpler concept of "this is the maximum amount
>> of processes running vacuum at any time". The launcher is very
>> uninteresting to users.

Adding to this, the launcher will not consume maintenance_work_mem
whereas each worker is able to allocate that much, IIUC.

> I committed things that way, but I'm still not convinced that we
> shouldn't expose the launcher in pg_stat_activity. The thing that
> is bothering me is that it is now able to take locks and potentially
> could block some other process or even participate in a deadlock.
> Do we really want to have entries in pg_locks that don't match any
> entry in pg_stat_activity?

Having the launcher locks show as such gets my vote too, but then I'm
following on your opinion that a launcher ain't a worker and that users
need to know about it.

Let's keep the autovacuum_max_workers GUC naming, not counting the
"there can be only one" launcher so that we're able to size
maintenance_work_mem.

Regards,
--
dim