Re: Reduced power consumption in autovacuum launcher process

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 03:12:20PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> > On 18.07.2011 18:32, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> Hmm.  Well, it's not too late to rethink the WaitLatch API, if we think
> >> that that might be a significant limitation.
> 
> > Right, we can easily change the timeout argument to be in milliseconds 
> > instead of microseconds.
> 
> On the whole I'd be more worried about giving up the shorter waits than
> the longer ones --- it's not too hard to imagine using submillisecond
> timeouts in the future, as machines get faster.  If we really wanted to
> fix this, I think we need to move to a wider datatype.
> 
>             regards, tom lane
> 

You could also tag the high bit to allow you to encode larger ranges
by having microseconds for the values with the high bit = 0 and use
milliseconds for the values with the high bit = 1. Then you could
have the best of both without punching up the width of the datatype.

Regard,
Ken