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Tom Lane authored
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 4cdf51e6 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 suggest that calling WSACleanup during PQfinish might be 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. If this proves to suppress the fairly-common ecpg test failures we see on Windows, I'll back-patch, but for now let's just do it in HEAD and see what happens. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/ac976d8c-03df-d6b8-025c-15a2de8d9af1@postgrespro.ru
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