From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
cc: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>,
        Nitin Jadhav <nitinjadhavpostgres@gmail.com>,
        Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>,
        Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>,
        Bharath Rupireddy <bharath.rupireddyforpostgres@gmail.com>,
        Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>,
 Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>,
        Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>,
        Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>,
        "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: when the startup process doesn't (logging startup delays)
In-reply-to: <202109291749.ejyaab7wazx7@alvherre.pgsql>
References: <202109291749.ejyaab7wazx7@alvherre.pgsql>
Comments: In-reply-to Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
	message dated "Wed, 29 Sep 2021 14:49:31 -0300"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Content-ID: <2992584.1632938816.1@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Date: Wed, 29 Sep 2021 14:06:56 -0400
Message-ID: <2992585.1632938816@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Archived-At: 
 <https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/2992585.1632938816%40sss.pgh.pa.us>
Precedence: bulk

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> writes:
> On 2021-Sep-29, Robert Haas wrote:
>> Well, this was my suggestion, because if you don't do this, you get
>> drift, which I think looks weird. Like the timestamps will be:
>> 
>> 13:41:05.012456
>> 13:41:15.072484
>> 13:41:25.149632
>> 
>> ...and it gets further and further off as it goes on.'

> Right ... I actually *expect* this drift to occur.  Maybe people
> generally don't like this, it just seems natural to me.  Are there other
> opinions on this aspect?

FWIW, I agree with Robert that it's nicer if the timeout doesn't drift.
There's a limit to how much complexity I'm willing to tolerate for that,
but it doesn't seem like this exceeds it.

The real comment I'd have here, though, is that writing one-off
code for this purpose is bad.  If we have a need for a repetitive
timeout, it'd be better to add the feature to timeout.c explicitly.
That would probably also remove the need for extra copies of the
timeout time.

			regards, tom lane