Re: postgresql and process titles

Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes:
> If backends store their current status in shared memory then a separate
> process entirely can receive the interrupts, scan through the shared memory
> process states and do the accounting.

This sounds good until you think about locking.  It'd be quite
impractical to implement anything as fine-grained as EXPLAIN ANALYZE
this way, because of the overhead involved in taking and releasing
spinlocks.

It could be practical as a replacement for stats_command_string
messages, though.

I'm not sure about replacing ps_status with this.  I don't think there
is a way for one process to set another's status (on most platforms
anyway).  You might argue that we could abandon ps_status reporting
altogether if we had something better, but I'm unconvinced ...
        regards, tom lane