Re: Missed check for too-many-children in bgworker spawning - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Stephen Frost
Subject Re: Missed check for too-many-children in bgworker spawning
Date
Msg-id 20191104190945.GF6962@tamriel.snowman.net
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Missed check for too-many-children in bgworker spawning  (Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>)
List pgsql-hackers
Greetings,

* Andres Freund (andres@anarazel.de) wrote:
> On 2019-10-09 12:29:18 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> > I would say rather that if fork() is failing on your system, you have
> > a not very stable system.
>
> I don't think that's really true, fwiw. It's often a good idea to turn
> on strict memory overcommit accounting, and with that set, it's actually
> fairly common to see fork() fail with ENOMEM, even if there's
> practically a reasonable amount of resources. Especially with larger
> shared buffers and without huge pages, the amount of memory needed for a
> postmaster child in the worst case is not insubstantial.

I've not followed this thread very closely, but I agree with Andres here
wrt fork() failing with ENOMEM in the field and not because the system
isn't stable.

Thanks,

Stephen

Attachment

pgsql-hackers by date:

Previous
From: Andres Freund
Date:
Subject: Re: cost based vacuum (parallel)
Next
From: Andres Freund
Date:
Subject: Re: Excessive disk usage in WindowAgg