Re: Interruptible sleeps (was Re: CommitFest 2009-07: Yay, Kevin! Thanks, reviewers!)

Tom Lane wrote:
> Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> > Tom Lane wrote:
> >> Well, yes they are.  They cause unnecessary process wakeups and thereby
> >> consume cycles even when the database is idle.  See for example a
> >> longstanding complaint here:
> >> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=252129
> 
> > ...  The only clear case where this is 
> > always a win is when the system it totally idle.
> 
> If you'll climb down off that horse for a moment: yeah, the idle case is
> *exactly* what they're complaining about.  In particular, the complaint
> is that it's unreasonable to have Postgres running on a machine at all
> unless it's actively being used, because it forces significant CPU power
> drain anyway.  That gets in the way of our plan for world domination,
> no?  If you can't have a PG sitting unobtrusively in the background,
> waiting for you to have a need for it, it won't get installed in the
> first place.  People will pick mysql, or something else with a smaller
> footprint, to put on their laptops, and then we lose some more mindshare.
> I see this as just another facet of the argument about whether it's okay
> to have default settings that try to take over the entire machine.

FYI, last week I was running PG 8.4.X with default settings on a T43
laptop running XP with 1 Gig of RAM and it caused a racing game I was
playing to run jerkily.  When I shut down the Postgres server, the
problem was fixed.  I was kind of surprised that an idle PG server could
cause that.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + It's impossible for everything to be true. +