Re: postgresql locks the whole table!

Greg Stark wrote:
> It's not strictly necessary to have a list of all xids at all. The normal
> "shared read lock" is just "take the write lock, increment the readers
> counter, unlock" Anyone who wants to write has to wait (using, eg, a condition
> variable) until the readers count goes to 0.
>
> This gets the right semantics but without the debugging info of a list of
> lockers. Other than debugging the only advantage I see to having the list of
> lockers is for deadlock detection. Is that absolutely mandatory?

What happens if a backend is killed and never decrements its reference
count?

Mike Mascari
mascarm@mascari.com