MagicStack / MagicStack/asyncpg

Prepared Statement connection is active and wait for ClientRead.

Open
#1,276 5 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
Python
Stars
8.1k
Forks
468
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Hi team,

Right now, asyncpg does prepared statements in two steps.

  1. Parse, Describe, Flush.
  2. Bind, Execute, Sync.

Two coroutines represent these two steps. In a highly concurrent setup, the wall-clock gap between these two steps can be large. Why is it causing a problem for me? Command Flush does not change the connection state, i.e., active. So I observe a lot of queries show up as

 wait_event_type | wait_event | state
-----------------+------------+--------
      Client    | ClientRead  | active

in pg_stat_activity. This causes a lot of unnecessary confusion for our database monitors/observability tools. The connection is essentially idle between these two steps, so I think it is better to report it as wait_event=ClientRead but state=idle? Meanwhile, the command Sync will change the connection state to idle, so after step 2, the connection becomes idle.

My ask is: could we use Sync instead of Flush in step 1?

Moreover, there could be more than one bind step, so the sequence could be

1. Parse, Describe, Flush.
2. Bind, Execute, Sync.
3. Bind, Execute, Sync.
...

In this case, the connection is active only between step 1 and step 2, but idle for all other step gaps. I kind of feel this behavior is inconsistent.
I might have neglected some basic design about PostgreSQL extended query. Hope to hear from you soon!

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with asyncpg’s prepared-statement flow described in the issue and PostgreSQL’s extended-query protocol documentation. Determine whether changing Flush/Sync sequencing can preserve correctness with multiple Bind/Execute steps; done means pg_stat_activity reports the connection state consistently without breaking prepared statements.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
postgresql, python
Domain
databases
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
30/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.