On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 10:21 AM Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > That's possible, certainly. It's also possible that it's a real bug > that so far has only manifested there for (say) timing reasons. > The buildfarm is not so large that we can write off single-machine > failures as being unlikely to hit in the real world. > > What I'd suggest is to promote that failure to elog(PANIC), which > would at least give us the PID and if we're lucky a stack trace.
That proposed change is fine with me. As to the question of whether it's a real bug, nobody can prove anything unless we actually run it down. It's just a question of what you think the odds are. Noah's PGCon talk a few years back on the long tail of buildfarm failures convinced me (perhaps unintentionally) that low-probability failures that occur only on obscure systems or configurations are likely not worth running down, because while they COULD be real bugs, a lot of them aren't, and the time it would take to figure it out could be spent on other things - for instance, fixing things that we know for certain are bugs. Spending 40 hours of person-time on something with a 10% chance of being a bug in the PostgreSQL code doesn't necessarily make sense to me, because while you are correct that the buildfarm isn't that large, neither is the developer community. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
