Re: RFC: replace pg_stat_activity.waiting with something more descriptive

On Wed, Jan 20, 2016 at 6:39 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 11:49 PM, Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> On the topic of the UI, I understand that redefining
> >> pg_stat_activity.waiting might cause some short-term annoyance.  But I
> >> think in the long term what we are proposing here is going to be a
> >> huge improvement, so I think it's worth the compatibility break.  If
> >> we say that pg_stat_activity.waiting has to continue meaning "waiting
> >> for a heavyweight lock" even though we now also expose (in some other
> >> location) information on other kinds of waits, that's going to be
> >> confusing to users.
> >
> > If we want to go via this route, then the first thing which we need to
> > decide is whether we want to start displaying the information of
> > background processes like WALWriter and others in pg_stat_activity?
>
> That doesn't seem like a particularly good fit - few of the fields are
> relevant to that case.  We could provide some other way of getting at
> the information for background processes if people want, but
> personally I'd probably be inclined not to bother with it for right
> now.
>