From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
cc: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>,
        Kevin McKibbin <kevinmckibbin123@gmail.com>,
        pgsql-performance@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: pgbench: could not connect to server: Resource temporarily
 unavailable
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Comments: In-reply-to Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
	message dated "Mon, 22 Aug 2022 14:02:50 +1200"
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Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2022 22:18:13 -0400
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Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2022 at 12:20 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> Hmm.  It'll be awhile till the 128 default disappears entirely
>> though, especially if assorted BSDen use that too.  Probably
>> worth the trouble to document.

> I could try to write a doc patch if you aren't already on it.

I haven't done anything about it yet, but could do so tomorrow or so.

(BTW, I just finished discovering that NetBSD has the same 128 limit.
It looks like they intended to make that settable via sysctl, because
it's a variable not a constant; but they haven't actually wired up the
variable to sysctl yet.)

> Oh, right.  Looks like that was just  paranoia in commit 153f4006763,
> back when you got away from using the (very conservative) SOMAXCONN
> macro.  Looks like that was 5 on ancient systems going back to the
> original sockets stuff, and later 128 was a popular number.  Yeah I'd
> say +1 for removing our cap.  I'm pretty sure every system will
> internally cap whatever value we pass in if it doesn't like it, as
> POSIX explicitly says it can freely do with this "hint".

Yeah.  I hadn't thought to check the POSIX text, but their listen(2)
page is pretty clear that implementations should *silently* reduce
the value to what they can handle, not fail.  Also, SUSv2 says the
same thing in different words, so the requirement's been that way
for a very long time.  I think we could drop this ancient bit of
paranoia.

> ... Hmm, maybe we could add a hint to the error,
> though?

libpq doesn't really have a notion of hints --- perhaps we ought
to fix that sometime.  But this doesn't seem like a very exciting
place to start, given the paucity of prior complaints.  (And anyway
people using other client libraries wouldn't be helped.)  I think
some documentation in the "Managing Kernel Resources" section
should be plenty for this.

			regards, tom lane