Impossible to disable background workers

[ateuber]

We seem to have this issue in our CI/CD.

According to this comment there is a workaround by setting timescaledb.max_background_workers=0.

I tried to do this with timescaledb-tune --max-bg-workers=0, but it does not work. The reason is in this condition is true if MaxBGWorkers is not provided, but also if it is 0.

[konskov]

hello @ateuber, thank you for reaching out. Since timescaledb-tune sets configuration parameters in postgresql.conf, I wonder if it might be possible for you to edit that file directly and add this line: timescaledb.max_background_workers=0? timescaledb-tune should also tell you the location of postgresql.conf. Or is doing that not possible in your environment?

[ateuber]

Hi @konskov, thank you for your reply.

With our CI we would then need to use our own docker image instead of timescaledb-docker, so it is a bit difficult at least. It seems now that disabling the telemetry via the environment variable solves the original problem, though - so we don't need to disable the background workers any more.
Corrections:

• Disabling the telemetry didn't solve the original problem for us, it just worked randomly.
• It's actually really easy to do this with timescaledb-docker: one can just add command: postgres -c timescaledb.max_background_workers=0 to the service definition. Now our problem is solved. 🙂

Still it would probably be nice if timescaledb-tune could do it or at least have it documented somewhere that it can't.