Re: Threading in BGWorkers (!) - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Andres Freund
Subject Re: Threading in BGWorkers (!)
Date
Msg-id 20200730184644.6ia7ifsxjigm3okg@alap3.anarazel.de
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Threading in BGWorkers (!)  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: Threading in BGWorkers (!)  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-hackers
Hi,

On 2020-07-28 21:52:20 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> >> The rationale here is that as far as I can tell this is the *only* blocker to using multithreaded code in a
BGWorkerwhich can't be avoided by adhering to strict code rules (eg: no PG calls from non-main threads, no interaction
withsignals from non-main threads).
 
> 
> TBH, though, I do not buy this argument for a millisecond.  I don't
> think that anything is going to come out of multithreading a bgworker
> but blood and tears.  Perhaps someday we'll make a major push to
> make the backend code (somewhat(?)) thread safe ... but I'm not on
> board with making one-line-at-a-time changes in hopes of getting
> partway there.  We need some kind of concrete plan for what is a
> usable amount of functionality and what has to be done to get it.

Why not? Our answer to threading inside functions has been, for quite a
while, that it's kinda ok if the threads never call into postgres and
can never escape the lifetime of a function. But that's not actually
really safe due to the signal handler issue. Whether it's a normal
backend or a bgworker doesn't really play a role here, no?

Greetings,

Andres Freund



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