Just as we would start bgworkers immediately after an initial startup
of the server, we should restart them immediately when reinitializing.
Petr Jelinek and Robert Haas
Although previously-introduced APIs allow the process that registers a
background worker to obtain the worker's PID, there's no way to prevent
a worker that is not currently running from being restarted. This
patch introduces a new API TerminateBackgroundWorker() that prevents
the background worker from being restarted, terminates it if it is
currently running, and causes it to be unregistered if or when it is
not running.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier and KaiGai Kohei.
Using the infrastructure provided by this patch, it's possible either
to wait for the startup of a dynamically-registered background worker,
or to poll the status of such a worker without waiting. In either
case, the current PID of the worker process can also be obtained.
As usual, worker_spi is updated to demonstrate the new functionality.
Patch by me. Review by Andres Freund.
Previously one had to use slist_delete(), implying an additional scan of
the list, making this infrastructure considerably less efficient than
traditional Lists when deletion of element(s) in a long list is needed.
Modify the slist_foreach_modify() macro to support deleting the current
element in O(1) time, by keeping a "prev" pointer in addition to "cur"
and "next". Although this makes iteration with this macro a bit slower,
no real harm is done, since in any scenario where you're not going to
delete the current list element you might as well just use slist_foreach
instead. Improve the comments about when to use each macro.
Back-patch to 9.3 so that we'll have consistent semantics in all branches
that provide ilist.h. Note this is an ABI break for callers of
slist_foreach_modify().
Andres Freund and Tom Lane
There is a new API, RegisterDynamicBackgroundWorker, which allows
an ordinary user backend to register a new background writer during
normal running. This means that it's no longer necessary for all
background workers to be registered during processing of
shared_preload_libraries, although the option of registering workers
at that time remains available.
When a background worker exits and will not be restarted, the
slot previously used by that background worker is automatically
released and becomes available for reuse. Slots used by background
workers that are configured for automatic restart can't (yet) be
released without shutting down the system.
This commit adds a new source file, bgworker.c, and moves some
of the existing control logic for background workers there.
Previously, there was little enough logic that it made sense to
keep everything in postmaster.c, but not any more.
This commit also makes the worker_spi contrib module into an
extension and adds a new function, worker_spi_launch, which can
be used to demonstrate the new facility.
