On 2018-Jun-20, Craig Ringer wrote: > Hi folks > > I recently needed a way to get backtraces from errors in a convenient, > non-interactive and indescriminate way. The attached patch is the result. > It teaches Pg to use libunwind to self-backtrace in elog/ereport. > > Anyone think this is useful/interesting/worth pursuing?
I think we sorely need some mechanism to optionally get backtraces in error messages. I think having backtraces in all messages is definitely not a good thing, but requiring an explicit marker (such as in my patch) means the code has to be recompiled, which is not a solution in production systems. I kind lean towards your approach, but it has to be something that's easily enabled/disabled at runtime. I have no idea how expensive backtrace() and libunwind are, but I doubt we want to pay the cost for every message before we know that error requires the backtrace to be collected. Something like PGC_USERSET server_min_backtraces=PANIC might be a possible interface. -- Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services