We don't actually need a lock to set PGPROC->statusFlags itself; what we
do need is a shared lock on either XidGenLock or ProcArrayLock in order to
ensure MyProc->pgxactoff keeps still while we modify the mirror array in
ProcGlobal->statusFlags. Some places were using an exclusive lock for
that, which is excessive. Relax those to use shared lock only.
procarray.c has a couple of places with somewhat brittle assumptions
about PGPROC changes: ProcArrayEndTransaction uses only shared lock, so
it's permissible to change MyProc only. On the other hand,
ProcArrayEndTransactionInternal also changes other procs, so it must
hold exclusive lock. Add asserts to ensure those assumptions continue
to hold.
Author: Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20201117155501.GA13805@alvherre.pgsql
When ComputeXidHorizons() was called before MyDatabaseOid is set,
e.g. because a dead row in a shared relation is encountered during
InitPostgres(), the horizon for normal tables was computed too
aggressively, ignoring all backends connected to a database.
During subsequent pruning in a data table the too aggressive horizon
could end up still being used, possibly leading to still needed tuples
being removed. Not good.
This is a bug in dc7420c2c92, which the test added in 94bc27b5768 made
visible, if run with force_parallel_mode set to regress. In that case
the bug is reliably triggered, because "pruning_query" is run in a
parallel worker and the start of that parallel worker is likely to
encounter a dead row in pg_database.
The fix is trivial: Compute a more pessimistic data table horizon if
MyDatabaseId is not yet known.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20201029040030.p4osrmaywhqaesd4@alap3.anarazel.de
This fixes a bug in the edge case where, for a temp table, heap_page_prune()
can end up with a different horizon than heap_vacuum_rel(). Which can trigger
errors like "ERROR: cannot freeze committed xmax ...".
The bug was introduced due to interaction of a7212be8b9e "Set cutoff xmin more
aggressively when vacuuming a temporary table." with dc7420c2c92 "snapshot
scalability: Don't compute global horizons while building snapshots.".
The problem is caused by lazy_scan_heap() assuming that the only reason its
HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum() call would return HEAPTUPLE_DEAD is if the tuple is
a HOT tuple, or if the tuple's inserting transaction has aborted since the
heap_page_prune() call. But after a7212be8b9e that was also possible in other
cases for temp tables, because heap_page_prune() uses a different visibility
test after dc7420c2c92.
The fix is fairly simple: Move the special case logic for temp tables from
vacuum_set_xid_limits() to the infrastructure introduced in dc7420c2c92. That
ensures that the horizon used for pruning is at least as aggressive as the one
used by lazy_scan_heap(). The concrete horizon used for temp tables is
slightly different than the logic in dc7420c2c92, but should always be as
aggressive as before (see comments).
A significant benefit to centralizing the logic procarray.c is that now the
more aggressive horizons for temp tables does not just apply to VACUUM but
also to e.g. HOT pruning and the nbtree killtuples logic.
Because isTopLevel is not needed by vacuum_set_xid_limits() anymore, I
undid the the related changes from a7212be8b9e.
This commit also adds an isolation test ensuring that the more aggressive
vacuuming and pruning of temp tables keeps working.
Debugged-By: Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com>
Debugged-By: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Debugged-By: Ashutosh Sharma <ashu.coek88@gmail.com>
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20201014203103.72oke6hqywcyhx7s@alap3.anarazel.de
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20201015083735.derdzysdtqdvxshp@alap3.anarazel.de
I (Andres) broke this in 623a9CA79bx, because I didn't think about the
way snapshots are built on standbys sufficiently. Unfortunately our
existing tests did not catch this, as they are all just querying with
psql (therefore ending up with fresh snapshots).
The fix is trivial, we just need to increment the transaction
completion counter in ExpireTreeKnownAssignedTransactionIds(), which
is the equivalent of ProcArrayEndTransaction() during recovery.
This commit also adds a new test doing some basic testing of the
correctness of snapshots built on standbys. To avoid the
aforementioned issue of one-shot psql's not exercising the snapshot
caching, the test uses a long lived psqls, similar to
013_crash_restart.pl. It'd be good to extend the test further.
Reported-By: Ian Barwick <ian.barwick@2ndquadrant.com>
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Author: Ian Barwick <ian.barwick@2ndquadrant.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/61291ffe-d611-f889-68b5-c298da9fb18f@2ndquadrant.com
This corrects an oversight by me in 20729324078, which made
ProcArrayClearTransaction() increment xactCompletionCount. That requires an
exclusive lock, obviously.
There's other approaches that avoid the exclusive acquisition, but given that a
2PC commit is fairly heavyweight, it doesn't seem worth doing so. I've not been
able to measure a performance difference, unsurprisingly. I did add a
comment documenting that we could do so, should it ever become a bottleneck.
Reported-By: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1355915.1597794204@sss.pgh.pa.us
When preparing a transaction xactCompletionCount needs to be
incremented, even though the transaction has not committed
yet. Otherwise the snapshot used within the transaction otherwise can
get reused outside of the prepared transaction. As GetSnapshotData()
does not include the current xid when building a snapshot, reuse would
not be correct.
Somewhat surprisingly the regression tests only rarely show incorrect
results without the fix. The reason for that is that often the
snapshot's xmax will be >= the backend xid, yielding a snapshot that
is correct, despite the bug.
I'm working on a reliable test for the bug, but it seems worth seeing
whether this fixes all the BF failures while I do.
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1k7tGP-0005V0-5k@gemulon.postgresql.org
Previous commits made it faster/more scalable to compute snapshots. But not
building a snapshot is still faster. Now that GetSnapshotData() does not
maintain RecentGlobal* anymore, that is actually not too hard:
This commit introduces xactCompletionCount, which tracks the number of
top-level transactions with xids (i.e. which may have modified the database)
that completed in some form since the start of the server.
We can avoid rebuilding the snapshot's contents whenever the current
xactCompletionCount is the same as it was when the snapshot was
originally built. Currently this check happens while holding
ProcArrayLock. While it's likely possible to perform the check without
acquiring ProcArrayLock, it seems better to do that separately /
later, some careful analysis is required. Even with the lock this is a
significant win on its own.
On a smaller two socket machine this gains another ~1.03x, on a larger
machine the effect is roughly double (earlier patch version tested
though). If we were able to safely avoid the lock there'd be another
significant gain on top of that.
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200301083601.ews6hz5dduc3w2se@alap3.anarazel.de
This bug, recently introduced in 941697c3c1a, at least lead to vacuum
failing because it found tuples inserted by a running transaction, but
below the freeze limit. The freeze limit in turn is directly affected
by the aforementioned bug.
Thanks to Tom Lane figuring how to make the bug reproducible.
We should add a few more assertions to make sure this type of bug
isn't as hard to notice, but it's not yet clear how to best do so.
Co-Diagnosed-By: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1013484.1597609043@sss.pgh.pa.us
Similar to the previous changes this increases the chance that data
frequently needed by GetSnapshotData() stays in l2 cache. In many
workloads subtransactions are very rare, and this makes the check for
that considerably cheaper.
As this removes the last member of PGXACT, there is no need to keep it
around anymore.
On a larger 2 socket machine this and the two preceding commits result
in a ~1.07x performance increase in read-only pgbench. For read-heavy
mixed r/w workloads without row level contention, I see about 1.1x.
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200301083601.ews6hz5dduc3w2se@alap3.anarazel.de
Similar to the previous commit this increases the chance that data
frequently needed by GetSnapshotData() stays in l2 cache. As we now
take care to not unnecessarily write to ProcGlobal->vacuumFlags, there
should be very few modifications to the ProcGlobal->vacuumFlags array.
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200301083601.ews6hz5dduc3w2se@alap3.anarazel.de
The new array contains the xids for all connected backends / in-use
PGPROC entries in a dense manner (in contrast to the PGPROC/PGXACT
arrays which can have unused entries interspersed).
This improves performance because GetSnapshotData() always needs to
scan the xids of all live procarray entries and now there's no need to
go through the procArray->pgprocnos indirection anymore.
As the set of running top-level xids changes rarely, compared to the
number of snapshots taken, this substantially increases the likelihood
of most data required for a snapshot being in l2 cache. In
read-mostly workloads scanning the xids[] array will sufficient to
build a snapshot, as most backends will not have an xid assigned.
To keep the xid array dense ProcArrayRemove() needs to move entries
behind the to-be-removed proc's one further up in the array. Obviously
moving array entries cannot happen while a backend sets it
xid. I.e. locking needs to prevent that array entries are moved while
a backend modifies its xid.
To avoid locking ProcArrayLock in GetNewTransactionId() - a fairly hot
spot already - ProcArrayAdd() / ProcArrayRemove() now needs to hold
XidGenLock in addition to ProcArrayLock. Adding / Removing a procarray
entry is not a very frequent operation, even taking 2PC into account.
Due to the above, the dense array entries can only be read or modified
while holding ProcArrayLock and/or XidGenLock. This prevents a
concurrent ProcArrayRemove() from shifting the dense array while it is
accessed concurrently.
While the new dense array is very good when needing to look at all
xids it is less suitable when accessing a single backend's xid. In
particular it would be problematic to have to acquire a lock to access
a backend's own xid. Therefore a backend's xid is not just stored in
the dense array, but also in PGPROC. This also allows a backend to
only access the shared xid value when the backend had acquired an
xid.
The infrastructure added in this commit will be used for the remaining
PGXACT fields in subsequent commits. They are kept separate to make
review easier.
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200301083601.ews6hz5dduc3w2se@alap3.anarazel.de
Now that xmin isn't needed for GetSnapshotData() anymore, it leads to
unnecessary cacheline ping-pong to have it in PGXACT, as it is updated
considerably more frequently than the other PGXACT members.
After the changes in dc7420c2c92, this is a very straight-forward change.
For highly concurrent, snapshot acquisition heavy, workloads this change alone
can significantly increase scalability. E.g. plain pgbench on a smaller 2
socket machine gains 1.07x for read-only pgbench, 1.22x for read-only pgbench
when submitting queries in batches of 100, and 2.85x for batches of 100
'SELECT';. The latter numbers are obviously not to be expected in the
real-world, but micro-benchmark the snapshot computation
scalability (previously spending ~80% of the time in GetSnapshotData()).
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200301083601.ews6hz5dduc3w2se@alap3.anarazel.de
To make GetSnapshotData() more scalable, it cannot not look at at each proc's
xmin: While snapshot contents do not need to change whenever a read-only
transaction commits or a snapshot is released, a proc's xmin is modified in
those cases. The frequency of xmin modifications leads to, particularly on
higher core count systems, many cache misses inside GetSnapshotData(), despite
the data underlying a snapshot not changing. That is the most
significant source of GetSnapshotData() scaling poorly on larger systems.
Without accessing xmins, GetSnapshotData() cannot calculate accurate horizons /
thresholds as it has so far. But we don't really have to: The horizons don't
actually change that much between GetSnapshotData() calls. Nor are the horizons
actually used every time a snapshot is built.
The trick this commit introduces is to delay computation of accurate horizons
until there use and using horizon boundaries to determine whether accurate
horizons need to be computed.
The use of RecentGlobal[Data]Xmin to decide whether a row version could be
removed has been replaces with new GlobalVisTest* functions. These use two
thresholds to determine whether a row can be pruned:
1) definitely_needed, indicating that rows deleted by XIDs >= definitely_needed
are definitely still visible.
2) maybe_needed, indicating that rows deleted by XIDs < maybe_needed can
definitely be removed
GetSnapshotData() updates definitely_needed to be the xmin of the computed
snapshot.
When testing whether a row can be removed (with GlobalVisTestIsRemovableXid())
and the tested XID falls in between the two (i.e. XID >= maybe_needed && XID <
definitely_needed) the boundaries can be recomputed to be more accurate. As it
is not cheap to compute accurate boundaries, we limit the number of times that
happens in short succession. As the boundaries used by
GlobalVisTestIsRemovableXid() are never reset (with maybe_needed updated by
GetSnapshotData()), it is likely that further test can benefit from an earlier
computation of accurate horizons.
To avoid regressing performance when old_snapshot_threshold is set (as that
requires an accurate horizon to be computed), heap_page_prune_opt() doesn't
unconditionally call TransactionIdLimitedForOldSnapshots() anymore. Both the
computation of the limited horizon, and the triggering of errors (with
SetOldSnapshotThresholdTimestamp()) is now only done when necessary to remove
tuples.
This commit just removes the accesses to PGXACT->xmin from
GetSnapshotData(), but other members of PGXACT residing in the same
cache line are accessed. Therefore this in itself does not result in a
significant improvement. Subsequent commits will take advantage of the
fact that GetSnapshotData() now does not need to access xmins anymore.
Note: This contains a workaround in heap_page_prune_opt() to keep the
snapshot_too_old tests working. While that workaround is ugly, the tests
currently are not meaningful, and it seems best to address them separately.
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>
Reviewed-By: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200301083601.ews6hz5dduc3w2se@alap3.anarazel.de
The reason for doing so is that a subsequent commit will need that to
avoid wraparound issues. As the subsequent change is large this was
split out for easier review.
The reason this is not a perfect straight-forward change is that we do
not want track 64bit xids in the procarray or the WAL. Therefore we
need to advance lastestCompletedXid in relation to 32 bit xids. The
code for that is now centralized in MaintainLatestCompletedXid*.
Author: Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Thomas Munro, Robert Haas, David Rowley
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200301083601.ews6hz5dduc3w2se@alap3.anarazel.de
Including Full in variable names duplicates the type information and
leads to overly long names. As FullTransactionId cannot accidentally
be casted to TransactionId that does not seem necessary.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200724011143.jccsyvsvymuiqfxu@alap3.anarazel.de
Includes some manual cleanup of places that pgindent messed up,
most of which weren't per project style anyway.
Notably, it seems some people didn't absorb the style rules of
commit c9d297751, because there were a bunch of new occurrences
of function calls with a newline just after the left paren, all
with faulty expectations about how the rest of the call would get
indented.
There is little point in using the LWLockRegisterTranche mechanism for
built-in tranche names. It wastes cycles, it creates opportunities for
bugs (since failing to register a tranche name is a very hard-to-detect
problem), and the lack of any centralized list of names encourages
sloppy nonconformity in name choices. Moreover, since we have a
centralized list of the tranches anyway in enum BuiltinTrancheIds, we're
certainly not buying any flexibility in return for these disadvantages.
Hence, nuke all the backend-internal LWLockRegisterTranche calls,
and instead provide a const array of the builtin tranche names.
(I have in mind to change a bunch of these names shortly, but this
patch is just about getting them into one place.)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/9056.1589419765@sss.pgh.pa.us
The goal of separating hotly accessed per-backend data from PGPROC
into PGXACT is to make accesses fast (GetSnapshotData() in
particular). But delayChkpt is not actually accessed frequently; only
when starting a checkpoint. As it is frequently modified (multiple
times in the course of a single transaction), storing it in the same
cacheline as hotly accessed data unnecessarily dirties a contended
cacheline.
Therefore move delayChkpt to PGPROC.
This is part of a larger series of patches intending to improve
GetSnapshotData() scalability. It is committed and pushed separately,
as it is independently beneficial (small but measurable win, limited
by the other frequent modifications of PGXACT).
Author: Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas, Thomas Munro, David Rowley
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200301083601.ews6hz5dduc3w2se@alap3.anarazel.de
When certain parameters are changed on a physical replication primary,
this is communicated to standbys using the XLOG_PARAMETER_CHANGE WAL
record. The standby then checks whether its own settings are at least
as big as the ones on the primary. If not, the standby shuts down
with a fatal error.
The correspondence of settings between primary and standby is required
because those settings influence certain shared memory sizings that
are required for processing WAL records that the primary might send.
For example, if the primary sends a prepared transaction, the standby
must have had max_prepared_transaction set appropriately or it won't
be able to process those WAL records.
However, fatally shutting down the standby immediately upon receipt of
the parameter change record might be a bit of an overreaction. The
resources related to those settings are not required immediately at
that point, and might never be required if the activity on the primary
does not exhaust all those resources. If we just let the standby roll
on with recovery, it will eventually produce an appropriate error when
those resources are used.
So this patch relaxes this a bit. Upon receipt of
XLOG_PARAMETER_CHANGE, we still check the settings but only issue a
warning and set a global flag if there is a problem. Then when we
actually hit the resource issue and the flag was set, we issue another
warning message with relevant information. At that point we pause
recovery, so a hot standby remains usable. We also repeat the last
warning message once a minute so it is harder to miss or ignore.
Reviewed-by: Sergei Kornilov <sk@zsrv.org>
Reviewed-by: Masahiko Sawada <masahiko.sawada@2ndquadrant.com>
Reviewed-by: Kyotaro Horiguchi <horikyota.ntt@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/4ad69a4c-cc9b-0dfe-0352-8b1b0cd36c7b@2ndquadrant.com
The need for this was removed by
8b9e9644dc6a9bd4b7a97950e6212f63880cf18b.
A number of files now need to include utils/acl.h or
parser/parse_node.h explicitly where they previously got it indirectly
somehow.
Since parser/parse_node.h already includes nodes/parsenodes.h, the
latter is then removed where the former was added. Also, remove
nodes/pg_list.h from objectaddress.h, since that's included via
nodes/parsenodes.h.
Reviewed-by: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Reviewed-by: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/7601e258-26b2-8481-36d0-dc9dca6f28f1%402ndquadrant.com
This new option terminates the other sessions connected to the target
database and then drop it. To terminate other sessions, the current user
must have desired permissions (same as pg_terminate_backend()). We don't
allow to terminate the sessions if prepared transactions, active logical
replication slots or subscriptions are present in the target database.
Author: Pavel Stehule with changes by me
Reviewed-by: Dilip Kumar, Vignesh C, Ibrar Ahmed, Anthony Nowocien,
Ryan Lambert and Amit Kapila
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAP_rwwmLJJbn70vLOZFpxGw3XD7nLB_7+NKz46H5EOO2k5H7OQ@mail.gmail.com
This addresses a couple of issues in the code:
- Typos and inconsistencies in comments and function declarations.
- Removal of unreferenced function declarations.
- Removal of unnecessary compile flags.
- A cleanup error in regressplans.sh.
Author: Alexander Lakhin
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/0c991fdf-2670-1997-c027-772a420c4604@gmail.com
Instead of inferring epoch progress from xids and checkpoints,
introduce a 64 bit FullTransactionId type and use it to track xid
generation. This fixes an unlikely bug where the epoch is reported
incorrectly if the range of active xids wraps around more than once
between checkpoints.
The only user-visible effect of this commit is to correct the epoch
used by txid_current() and txid_status(), also visible with
pg_controldata, in those rare circumstances. It also creates some
basic infrastructure so that later patches can use 64 bit
transaction IDs in more places.
The new type is a struct that we pass by value, as a form of strong
typedef. This prevents the sort of accidental confusion between
TransactionId and FullTransactionId that would be possible if we
were to use a plain old uint64.
Author: Thomas Munro
Reported-by: Amit Kapila
Reviewed-by: Andres Freund, Tom Lane, Heikki Linnakangas
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAA4eK1%2BMv%2Bmb0HFfWM9Srtc6MVe160WFurXV68iAFMcagRZ0dQ%40mail.gmail.com
Given these routines are heap specific, and that there will be more
generic visibility support in via table AM, it makes sense to move the
prototypes to heapam.h (routines like HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum will
not be exposed in a generic fashion, because they are too storage
specific).
Similarly, the code in tqual.c is specific to heap, so moving it into
access/heap/ makes sense.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180703070645.wchpu5muyto5n647@alap3.anarazel.de
The use of volatiles in procarray.c largely originated from the time
when postgres did not have reliable compiler and memory
barriers. That's not the case anymore, so we can do better.
Several of the functions in procarray.c can be bottlenecks, and
removal of volatile yields mildly better code.
The new state, with explicit memory barriers, is also more
correct. The previous use of volatile did not actually deliver
sufficient guarantees on weakly ordered machines, in particular the
logic in GetNewTransactionId() does not look safe. It seems unlikely
to be a problem in practice, but worth fixing.
Thomas and I independently wrote a patch for this.
Reported-By: Andres Freund and Thomas Munro
Author: Andres Freund, with cherrypicked changes from a patch by Thomas Munro
Discussion:
https://postgr.es/m/20181005172955.wyjb4fzcdzqtaxjq@alap3.anarazel.dehttps://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=1nff0x=7i3YQO16jLA2qw-F9O39YmUew4oq-xcBQBs0g@mail.gmail.com
Previously the code checked PROC_IN_LOGICAL_DECODING and
PROC_IN_VACUUM separately. As the relevant variable is marked as
volatile, the compiler cannot combine the two tests. As
GetSnapshotData() is pretty hot in a number of workloads, it's
worthwhile to fix that.
It'd also be a good idea to get rid of the volatiles altogether. But
for one that's a larger patch, and for another, the code after this
change still seems at least as easy to read as before.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20181005172955.wyjb4fzcdzqtaxjq@alap3.anarazel.de
On a primary, sets of XLOG_RUNNING_XACTS records are generated on a
periodic basis to allow recovery to build the initial state of
transactions for a hot standby. The set of transaction IDs is created
by scanning all the entries in ProcArray. However it happens that its
logic never counted on the fact that two-phase transactions finishing to
prepare can put ProcArray in a state where there are two entries with
the same transaction ID, one for the initial transaction which gets
cleared when prepare finishes, and a second, dummy, entry to track that
the transaction is still running after prepare finishes. This way
ensures a continuous presence of the transaction so as callers of for
example TransactionIdIsInProgress() are always able to see it as alive.
So, if a XLOG_RUNNING_XACTS takes a standby snapshot while a two-phase
transaction finishes to prepare, the record can finish with duplicated
XIDs, which is a state expected by design. If this record gets applied
on a standby to initial its recovery state, then it would simply fail,
so the odds of facing this failure are very low in practice. It would
be tempting to change the generation of XLOG_RUNNING_XACTS so as
duplicates are removed on the source, but this requires to hold on
ProcArrayLock for longer and this would impact all workloads,
particularly those using heavily two-phase transactions.
XLOG_RUNNING_XACTS is also actually used only to initialize the standby
state at recovery, so instead the solution is taken to discard
duplicates when applying the initial snapshot.
Diagnosed-by: Konstantin Knizhnik
Author: Michael Paquier
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/0c96b653-4696-d4b4-6b5d-78143175d113@postgrespro.ru
Backpatch-through: 9.3
