Re: Rename max_parallel_degree?

Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>

From: Josh berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
To: Peter Geoghegan <pg@heroku.com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Noah Misch <noah@leadboat.com>, David Rowley <david.rowley@2ndquadrant.com>, Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com>, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2016-05-31T17:23:13Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On 05/31/2016 10:16 AM, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 10:10 AM, Josh berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> wrote:
>> "max_parallel_degree is the amount of parallelism in the query, with the
>> understanding that the original parent process counts as 1, which means
>> that if you set it to 1 you get no parallelism, and if you want 4
>> parallel workers you need to set it to 5."
>>
>> Which one of those is going to require more explanations on -general and
>> -novice?  Bets?
>>
>> Let's not be complicated for the sake of being complicated.
> 
> But the distinction between parallel workers and backends that can
> participate in parallel query does need to be user-visible. Worker
> processes are a commodity (i.e. the user must consider
> max_worker_processes).

It's still WAY simpler to understand "max_parallel is the number of
parallel workers I requested".

Any system where you set it to 2 and get only 1 worker on an idle system
is going to cause endless queries on the mailing lists.

-- 
--
Josh Berkus
Red Hat OSAS
(any opinions are my own)