Meaningful thread names

[ABuch19]

Short description

When you profile a complex application (several threads) it is very useful when you can identify threads in top by name.

Details

When you try to identify what part of a complex application is consuming CPU power, you might use top -p nn -H. Unfortunately all threads used by the mosquitto library will get the same name than the "main thread". So it is hard to identify, if mosquitto is causing the CPU load or another part of the application.

Implementation ideas

Mosquitto is creating some or more threads internally. Today they will not get a specific thread name.

Idea 1 - automatic thread naming

The Mosquitto functions could name all internal threads automatically, e.g. mq_mon, mq_obsrv, etc.

Idea 2 - access to thread IDs

The API could offer access to the IDs of the internal created threads. So the application could name all the threads according to its own naming convention.

Idea 3 - optional parameter with thread names

The API could offer optional initiailization parameters with thread names to be used for the Mosquitto internal threads.

[ralight]

This sounds like a perfectly reasonable request. How about for 1.6.11 we do 1, and for 1.7 we also do 2.

[ABuch19]

Sounds good! I would be fine with 1.
But of course 2 would be more flexible - but would need some action from the application developer.
Maybe you could combine 1 and 2 for the 1.7? Set thread names by default, but optional the application could assign own thread names by using the thread IDs. I think most of the users would be happy with default thread-names. Only a minor number would like to give own thread names.

[ralight]

Agreed, that was what I mean by also doing 2 for 1.7.