Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.
To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.
A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.
Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.
We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
dynamic pool of event handles, we can permanently assign one for each
shared latch. Thanks to that, we no longer need a separate shared memory
block for latches, and we don't need to know in advance how many shared
latches there is, so you no longer need to remember to update
NumSharedLatches when you introduce a new latch to the system.
wait until it is set. Latches can be used to reliably wait until a signal
arrives, which is hard otherwise because signals don't interrupt select()
on some platforms, and even when they do, there's race conditions.
On Unix, latches use the so called self-pipe trick under the covers to
implement the sleep until the latch is set, without race conditions. On
Windows, Windows events are used.
Use the new latch abstraction to sleep in walsender, so that as soon as
a transaction finishes, walsender is woken up to immediately send the WAL
to the standby. This reduces the latency between master and standby, which
is good.
Preliminary work by Fujii Masao. The latch implementation is by me, with
helpful comments from many people.
In addition, add support for a "payload" string to be passed along with
each notify event.
This implementation should be significantly more efficient than the old one,
and is also more compatible with Hot Standby usage. There is not yet any
facility for HS slaves to receive notifications generated on the master,
although such a thing is possible in future.
Joachim Wieland, reviewed by Jeff Davis; also hacked on by me.
This includes two new kinds of postmaster processes, walsenders and
walreceiver. Walreceiver is responsible for connecting to the primary server
and streaming WAL to disk, while walsender runs in the primary server and
streams WAL from disk to the client.
Documentation still needs work, but the basics are there. We will probably
pull the replication section to a new chapter later on, as well as the
sections describing file-based replication. But let's do that as a separate
patch, so that it's easier to see what has been added/changed. This patch
also adds a new section to the chapter about FE/BE protocol, documenting the
protocol used by walsender/walreceivxer.
Bump catalog version because of two new functions,
pg_last_xlog_receive_location() and pg_last_xlog_replay_location(), for
monitoring the progress of replication.
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me
This patch gets us out from under the Unix limitation of two user-defined
signal types. We already had done something similar for signals directed to
the postmaster process; this adds multiplexing for signals directed to
backends and auxiliary processes (so long as they're connected to shared
memory).
As proof of concept, replace the former usage of SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2
for backends with use of the multiplexing mechanism. There are still some
hard-wired definitions of SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for other process types,
but getting rid of those doesn't seem interesting at the moment.
Fujii Masao
a backend has done exit(0) or exit(1) without having disengaged itself
from shared memory. We are at risk for this whenever third-party code is
loaded into a backend, since such code might not know it's supposed to go
through proc_exit() instead. Also, it is reported that under Windows
there are ways to externally kill a process that cause the status code
returned to the postmaster to be indistinguishable from a voluntary exit
(thank you, Microsoft). If this does happen then the system is probably
hosed --- for instance, the dead session might still be holding locks.
So the best recovery method is to treat this like a backend crash.
The dead man switch is armed for a particular child process when it
acquires a regular PGPROC, and disarmed when the PGPROC is released;
these should be the first and last touches of shared memory resources
in a backend, or close enough anyway. This choice means there is no
coverage for auxiliary processes, but I doubt we need that, since they
shouldn't be executing any user-provided code anyway.
This patch also improves the management of the EXEC_BACKEND
ShmemBackendArray array a bit, by reducing search costs.
Although this problem is of long standing, the lack of field complaints
seems to mean it's not critical enough to risk back-patching; at least
not till we get some more testing of this mechanism.
initialization, to give loadable modules a reasonable place to perform
creation of any shared memory areas they need. This is the logical conclusion
of our previous creation of RequestAddinShmemSpace() and RequestAddinLWLocks().
We don't need an explicit shmem_shutdown_hook, because the existing
on_shmem_exit and on_proc_exit mechanisms serve that need.
Also, adjust SubPostmasterMain so that libraries that got loaded into the
postmaster will be loaded into all child processes, not only regular backends.
This improves consistency with the non-EXEC_BACKEND behavior, and might be
necessary for functionality for some types of add-ons.
free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each
relation (except for hash indexes; they don't use FSM).
This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC options; remove any
trace of them from the backend, initdb, and documentation.
Rewrite contrib/pg_freespacemap to match the new FSM implementation. Also
introduce a new variant of the get_raw_page(regclass, int4, int4) function in
contrib/pageinspect that let's you to return pages from any relation fork, and
a new fsm_page_contents() function to inspect the new FSM pages.
unnecessary #include lines in it. Also, move some tuple routine prototypes and
macros to htup.h, which allows removal of heapam.h inclusion from some .c
files.
For this to work, a new header file access/sysattr.h needed to be created,
initially containing attribute numbers of system columns, for pg_dump usage.
While at it, make contrib ltree, intarray and hstore header files more
consistent with our header style.
deals with the queue, including locking etc, is all in sinvaladt.c. This means
that the struct definition of the queue, and the queue pointer, are now
internal "implementation details" inside sinvaladt.c.
Per my proposal dated 25-Jun-2007 and followup discussion.
continuously, and requests vacuum runs of "autovacuum workers" to postmaster.
The workers do the actual vacuum work. This allows for future improvements,
like allowing multiple autovacuum jobs running in parallel.
For now, the code keeps the original behavior of having a single autovac
process at any time by sleeping until the previous worker has finished.
modules; the first try was not usable in EXEC_BACKEND builds (e.g.,
Windows). Instead, just provide some entry points to increase the
allocation requests during postmaster start, and provide a dedicated
LWLock that can be used to synchronize allocation operations performed
by backends. Per discussion with Marc Munro.
current commands; instead, store current-status information in shared
memory. This substantially reduces the overhead of stats_command_string
and also ensures that pg_stat_activity is fully up to date at all times.
Per my recent proposal.
into a single mostly-physical-order scan of the index. This requires some
ticklish interlocking considerations, but should create no material
performance impact on normal index operations (at least given the
already-committed changes to make scans work a page at a time). VACUUM
itself should get significantly faster in any index that's degenerated to a
very nonlinear page order. Also, we save one pass over the index entirely,
except in the case where there were no deletions to do and so only one pass
happened anyway.
Original patch by Heikki Linnakangas, rework by Tom Lane.
an LWLock instead of a spinlock. This hardly matters on Unix machines
but should improve startup performance on Windows (or any port using
EXEC_BACKEND). Per previous discussion.
the data defining the semantics of a lock method (ie, conflict resolution
table and ancillary data, which is all constant) and the hash tables
storing the current state. The only thing we give up by this is the
ability to use separate hashtables for different lock methods, but there
is no need for that anyway. Put some extra fields into the LockMethod
definition structs to clean up some other uglinesses, like hard-wired
tests for DEFAULT_LOCKMETHOD and USER_LOCKMETHOD. This commit doesn't
do anything about the performance issues we were discussing, but it clears
away some of the underbrush that's in the way of fixing that.
to 'Size' (that is, size_t), and install overflow detection checks in it.
This allows us to remove the former arbitrary restrictions on NBuffers
etc. It won't make any difference in a 32-bit machine, but in a 64-bit
machine you could theoretically have terabytes of shared buffers.
(How efficiently we could manage 'em remains to be seen.) Similarly,
num_temp_buffers, work_mem, and maintenance_work_mem can be set above
2Gb on a 64-bit machine. Original patch from Koichi Suzuki, additional
work by moi.
communication structure, and make it its own module with its own lock.
This should reduce contention at least a little, and it definitely makes
the code seem cleaner. Per my recent proposal.
to eliminate unnecessary deadlocks. This commit adds SELECT ... FOR SHARE
paralleling SELECT ... FOR UPDATE. The implementation uses a new SLRU
data structure (managed much like pg_subtrans) to represent multiple-
transaction-ID sets. When more than one transaction is holding a shared
lock on a particular row, we create a MultiXactId representing that set
of transactions and store its ID in the row's XMAX. This scheme allows
an effectively unlimited number of row locks, just as we did before,
while not costing any extra overhead except when a shared lock actually
has to be shared. Still TODO: use the regular lock manager to control
the grant order when multiple backends are waiting for a row lock.
Alvaro Herrera and Tom Lane.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
to shared memory as soon as possible, ie, right after read_backend_variables.
The effective difference from the original code is that this happens
before instead of after read_nondefault_variables(), which loads GUC
information and is apparently capable of expanding the backend's memory
allocation more than you'd think it should. This should fix the
failure-to-attach-to-shared-memory reports we've been seeing on Windows.
Also clean up a few bits of unnecessarily grotty EXEC_BACKEND code.
performance front, but with feature freeze upon us I think it's time to
drive a stake in the ground and say that this will be in 7.5.
Alvaro Herrera, with some help from Tom Lane.
than being random pieces of other files. Give bgwriter responsibility
for all checkpoint activity (other than a post-recovery checkpoint);
so this child process absorbs the functionality of the former transient
checkpoint and shutdown subprocesses. While at it, create an actual
include file for postmaster.c, which for some reason never had its own
file before.
about a third, make it work on non-Windows platforms again. (But perhaps
I broke the WIN32 code, since I have no way to test that.) Fold all the
paths that fork postmaster child processes to go through the single
routine SubPostmasterMain, which takes care of resurrecting the state that
would normally be inherited from the postmaster (including GUC variables).
Clean up some places where there's no particularly good reason for the
EXEC and non-EXEC cases to work differently. Take care of one or two
FIXMEs that remained in the code.
of VACUUM cases so that VACUUM requests don't affect the ARC state at all,
avoid corner case where BufferSync would uselessly rewrite a buffer that
no longer contains the page that was to be flushed. Make some minor
other cleanups in and around the bufmgr as well, such as moving PinBuffer
and UnpinBuffer into bufmgr.c where they really belong.
* Changes incorrect CYGWIN defines to __CYGWIN__
* Some localtime returns NULL checks (when unchecked cause SEGVs under
Win32
regression tests)
* Rationalized CreateSharedMemoryAndSemaphores and
AttachSharedMemoryAndSemaphores (Bruce, I finally remembered to do it);
requires attention.
Claudio Natoli
the relcache, and so the notion of 'blind write' is gone. This should
improve efficiency in bgwriter and background checkpoint processes.
Internal restructuring in md.c to remove the not-very-useful array of
MdfdVec objects --- might as well just use pointers.
Also remove the long-dead 'persistent main memory' storage manager (mm.c),
since it seems quite unlikely to ever get resurrected.
PostmasterPid variable, which gets set (early) in PostmasterMain
getppid would not be the postmaster?
[fork/exec] Implements processCancelRequest by keeping an array of
pid/cancel_key structs in shared mem
[fork/exec] Moves AttachSharedMemoryAndSemaphores call for backends into
SubPostmasterMain
[win32] Implements reaper/waitpid by keeping an arrays of children
pids,handles in postmaster local mem
- this item is largely untested, for reasons which should be
obvious, but appears sound
[win32/all] Added extern for pgpipe in Win32 case, and changed the second
pipe call (which seems to have been missed earlier) to pgpipe
[win32] #define'd ftruncate to chsize in the Win32 case
[win32] PG_USLEEP for Win32 has a misplaced paren. Fixed.
[win32] DLLIMPORT handling for MingW case
Claudio Natoli
