It works on the principle of turning sockets into non-blocking, and then
emulate blocking behaviour on top of that, while allowing signals to
run. Signals are now implemented using an event instead of APCs, thus
getting rid of the issue of APCs not being compatible with "old style"
sockets functions.
It also moves the win32 specific code away from pqsignal.h/c into
port/win32, and also removes the "thread style workaround" of the APC
issue previously in place.
In order to make things work, a few things are also changed in pgstat.c:
1) There is now a separate pipe to the collector and the bufferer. This
is required because the pipe will otherwise only be signalled in one of
the processes when the postmaster goes down. The MS winsock code for
select() must have some kind of workaround for this behaviour, but I
have found no stable way of doing that. You really are not supposed to
use the same socket from more than one process (unless you use
WSADuplicateSocket(), in which case the docs specifically say that only
one will be flagged).
2) The check for "postmaster death" is moved into a separate select()
call after the main loop. The previous behaviour select():ed on the
postmaster pipe, while later explicitly saying "we do NOT check for
postmaster exit inside the loop".
The issue was that the code relies on the same select() call seeing both
the postmaster pipe *and* the pgstat pipe go away. This does not always
happen, and it appears that useing WSAEventSelect() makes it even more
common that it does not.
Since it's only called when the process exits, I don't think using a
separate select() call will have any significant impact on how the stats
collector works.
Magnus Hagander
