Re: Rename max_parallel_degree?

David G. Johnston <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>

From: "David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Josh berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>, Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com>, Peter Geoghegan <pg@heroku.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: 2016-05-31T19:43:23Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 3:35 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, May 31, 2016 at 3:19 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > I wrote:
> >> At the risk of opening another can of worms, what about renaming
> >> max_worker_processes as well?  It would be a good thing if that
> >> had "cluster" in it somewhere, or something that indicates it's a
> >> system-wide value not a per-session value.  "max_workers_per_cluster"
> >> would answer, though I'm not in love with it particularly.
> >
> > Actually, after a bit more thought, maybe "max_background_workers" would
> > be a good name?  That matches its existing documentation more closely:
> >
> >          Sets the maximum number of background processes that the system
> >          can support.  This parameter can only be set at server start.
> The
> >          default is 8.
> >
> > However, that would still leave us with max_background_workers as the
> > cluster-wide limit and max_parallel_workers as the per-query-node limit.
> > That naming isn't doing all that much to clarify the distinction.
>
> It sure isn't.  Also, I think that we might actually want to add an
> additional GUC to prevent the parallel query system from consuming the
> entire pool of processes established by max_worker_processes.


​My mind started going here too...though the question is whether you need a
reserved pool or whether we apply some algorithm if (max_parallel +
max_other > max_cluster).  That algorithm could be configurable (i.e.,
target ratio  20:10 where 20+10 == max_cluster).

David J.