From d2074daebe1699f0d48fa63f6ba196b6426023ad Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Tom Lane Date: Mon, 19 Oct 2020 11:23:51 -0400 Subject: In libpq for Windows, call WSAStartup once and WSACleanup not at all. The Windows documentation insists that every WSAStartup call should have a matching WSACleanup call. However, if that ever had actual relevance, it wasn't in this century. Every remotely-modern Windows kernel is capable of cleaning up when a process exits without doing that, and must be so to avoid resource leaks in case of a process crash. Moreover, Postgres backends have done WSAStartup without WSACleanup since commit 4cdf51e64 in 2004, and we've never seen any indication of a problem with that. libpq's habit of doing WSAStartup during connection start and WSACleanup during shutdown is also rather inefficient, since a series of non-overlapping connection requests leads to repeated, quite expensive DLL unload/reload cycles. We document a workaround for that (having the application call WSAStartup for itself), but that's just a kluge. It's also worth noting that it's far from uncommon for applications to exit without doing PQfinish, and we've not heard reports of trouble from that either. However, the real reason for acting on this is that recent experiments by Alexander Lakhin show that calling WSACleanup during PQfinish is triggering the symptom we occasionally see that a process using libpq fails to emit expected stdio output. Therefore, let's change libpq so that it calls WSAStartup only once per process, during the first connection attempt, and never calls WSACleanup at all. While at it, get rid of the only other WSACleanup call in our code tree, in pg_dump/parallel.c; that presumably is equally useless. Back-patch of HEAD commit 7d00a6b2d. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/ac976d8c-03df-d6b8-025c-15a2de8d9af1@postgrespro.ru --- doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml | 15 --------------- 1 file changed, 15 deletions(-) (limited to 'doc/src') diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml index a615dc0411c..1513484e7d0 100644 --- a/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml +++ b/doc/src/sgml/libpq.sgml @@ -91,21 +91,6 @@ - - - On Windows, there is a way to improve performance if a single - database connection is repeatedly started and shutdown. Internally, - libpq calls WSAStartup() and WSACleanup() for connection startup - and shutdown, respectively. WSAStartup() increments an internal - Windows library reference count which is decremented by WSACleanup(). - When the reference count is just one, calling WSACleanup() frees - all resources and all DLLs are unloaded. This is an expensive - operation. To avoid this, an application can manually call - WSAStartup() so resources will not be freed when the last database - connection is closed. - - - PQconnectdbParamsPQconnectdbParams -- cgit v1.2.3