Re: Add an optional timeout clause to isolationtester step.

On Sat, Mar 07, 2020 at 10:46:34AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> The arbitrarily-set timeouts that exist in some of the isolation tests
> are horrid kluges that have caused us lots of headaches in the past
> and no doubt will again in the future.  Aside from occasionally failing
> when a machine is particularly overloaded, they cause the tests to
> take far longer than necessary on decently-fast machines.  So ideally
> we'd get rid of those entirely in favor of some more-dynamic approach.
> Admittedly, I have no proposal for what that would be.  But adding yet
> more ways to set a (guaranteed-to-be-wrong) timeout seems like the
> wrong direction to be going in.  What's the actual need that you're
> trying to deal with?

As a matter of fact, the buildfarm member petalura just reported a
failure with the isolation test "timeouts", the machine being
extremely slow:
https://buildfarm.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/show_log.pl?nm=petalura&dt=2020-03-08%2011%3A20%3A05

test timeouts                     ... FAILED    60330 ms
[...]
-step update: DELETE FROM accounts WHERE accountid = 'checking'; <waiting ...>
-step update: <... completed>
+step update: DELETE FROM accounts WHERE accountid = 'checking';
 ERROR:  canceling statement due to statement timeout
--
Michael