Considering the adaptive connection management
improvements that we plan to roll soon, it makes it
very helpful to know the number of active client
backends.
We are doing this addition to simplify yhe adaptive connection
management for single node Citus. In single node Citus, both the
client backends and Citus parallel queries would compete to get
slots on Postgres' `max_connections` on the same Citus database.
With adaptive connection management, we have the counters for
Citus parallel queries. That helps us to adaptively decide
on the remote executions pool size (e.g., throttle connections
if necessary).
However, we do not have any counters for the total number of
client backends on the database. For single node Citus, we
should consider all the client backends, not only the remote
connections that Citus does.
Of course Postgres internally knows how many client
backends are active. However, to get that number Postgres
iterates over all the backends. For examaple, see [pg_stat_get_db_numbackends](8e90ec5580/src/backend/utils/adt/pgstatfuncs.c (L1240))
where Postgres iterates over all the backends.
For our purpuses, we need this information on every connection
establishment. That's why we cannot affort to do this kind of
iterattion.
Onder Kalaci