Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: Support load balancing in libpq

Jelte Fennema-Nio <postgres@jeltef.nl>

From: Jelte Fennema <postgres@jeltef.nl>
To: Jacob Champion <jchampion@timescale.com>
Cc: Maxim Orlov <orlovmg@gmail.com>, Jelte Fennema <Jelte.Fennema@microsoft.com>, Michael Banck <mbanck@gmx.net>, Aleksander Alekseev <aleksander@timescale.com>, "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2023-01-13T17:10:23Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments

> Just a quick single-issue review, but I agree with Maxim that having
> one PRNG, seeded once, would be simpler

I don't agree that it's simpler. Because now there's a mutex you have
to manage, and honestly cross-platform threading in C is not simple.
However, I attached two additional patches that implement this
approach on top of the previous patchset. Just to make sure that
this patch is not blocked on this.

> with the tangible benefit that it would eliminate weird behavior on
> simultaneous connections when the client isn't using OpenSSL.

This is true, but still I think in practice very few people have a libpq
that's compiled without OpenSSL support.

> I'm guessing a simple lock on a
> global PRNG would be less overhead than the per-connection
> strong_random machinery, too, but I have no data to back that up.

It might very well have less overhead, but neither of them should take
up any significant amount of time during connection establishment.

> The test seed could then be handled globally as well (envvar?) so that you
> don't have to introduce a debug-only option into the connection string.

Why is a debug-only envvar any better than a debug-only connection option?
For now I kept the connection option approach, since to me they seem pretty
much equivalent.

Commits

  1. Fix pointer cast for seed calculation on 32-bit systems

  2. Copy and store addrinfo in libpq-owned private memory

  3. libpq: Use modern socket flags, if available.