Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> writes:
> Excerpts from Daniel Farina's message of jue may 03 17:04:03 -0400 2012:
>> I sort of care about this, but only on systems that are not very busy
>> and could otherwise get by with fewer resources -- for example, it'd
>> be nice to turn off autovacuum and the stat collector if it really
>> doesn't have to be around. Perhaps a Nap Commander[0] process or
>> procedure (if baked into postmaster, to optimize to one process from
>> two) would do the trick?
> I'm not sure I see the point in worrying about this at all. I mean, a
> process doing nothing does not waste much resources, does it? Other
> than keeping a PID that you can't use for other stuff.
Even more to the point, killing a process and then relaunching it
whenever there's something for it to do seems likely to consume *more*
resources than just letting it sit. (So long as it's only just sitting,
of course. Processes with periodic-wakeup logic are another matter.)
Note that I'm not particularly in favor of having Yet Another process
just to manage clog extension; the incremental complexity seems way
more than anyone has shown to be justified. But the "resources"
argument against it seems pretty weak.
regards, tom lane