Re: when the startup process doesn't (logging startup delays)

On Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 3:10 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> That would be lovely, certainly.  But aren't you moving the goalposts
> rather far?  I don't think we make any promises about such things
> today, so why has the issue suddenly gotten more pressing?

Yeah, perhaps it's best to not to worry about it. I dislike failure to
worry about that case on general principle, but I agree with you that
it seems to be moving the goalposts a disproportionate distance.

> In particular,
> why do you think Nitin's patch is proof against this?  Seems to me it's
> probably got *more* failure cases, not fewer, if the system clock is
> acting funny.

You might be right. I sort of assumed that timeout.c had some defense
against this, but since that seems not to be the case, I suppose no
facility that depends on it can hope to stay out of trouble either.

> On the whole, in these days of NTP, I'm not sure I care to spend
> large amounts of effort on dealing with a bogus system clock.

It's certainly less of an issue than it used to be back in my day.

Any thoughts on the patch I attached?

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com