Re: Let's make PostgreSQL multi-threaded

Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi> writes:

I spoke with some folks at PGCon about making PostgreSQL multi-threaded, 
so that the whole server runs in a single process, with multiple 
threads. It has been discussed many times in the past, last thread on 
pgsql-hackers was back in 2017 when Konstantin made some experiments [0].

I feel that there is now pretty strong consensus that it would be a good 
thing, more so than before. Lots of work to get there, and lots of 
details to be hashed out, but no objections to the idea at a high level.

The purpose of this email is to make that silent consensus explicit. If 
you have objections to switching from the current multi-process 
architecture to a single-process, multi-threaded architecture, please 
speak up.

For the record, I think this will be a disaster.  There is far too much
code that will get broken, largely silently, and much of it is not
under our control.
			

If we were starting out today we would probably choose a threaded implementation. But moving to threaded now seems to me like a multi-year-multi-person project with the prospect of years to come chasing bugs and the prospect of fairly modest advantages. The risk to reward doesn't look great.

That's my initial reaction. I could be convinced otherwise.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com