Re: Rename max_parallel_degree?

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.