Move discussion of why our algorithm for taking snapshots in recovery
to a more appropriate location in the function, and delete incorrect
mention of taking a lock.
In the original coding of the autovacuum cancel feature, commit
acac68b2bc, an autovacuum process was
considered a target for cancellation if it was found to hard-block any
process examined in the deadlock search. This patch tightens the test so
that the autovacuum must directly hard-block the current process. This
should make the behavior more predictable in general, and in particular
it ensures that an autovacuum will not be canceled with less than
deadlock_timeout grace period. In the old coding, it was possible for an
autovacuum to be canceled almost instantly, given unfortunate timing of two
or more other processes' lock attempts.
This also justifies the logging methodology in the recent commit
d7318d43d891bd63e82dcfc27948113ed7b1db80; without this restriction, that
patch isn't providing enough information to see the connection of the
canceling process to the autovacuum. Like that one, patch all the way
back.
The old message was at DEBUG2, so typically it didn't show up in the
log at all. As a result, in most cases where autovacuum was canceled,
the only information that was logged was the table being vacuumed,
with no indication as to what problem caused the cancel. Crank up
the level to LOG and add some more details to assist with debugging.
Back-patch all the way, per discussion on pgsql-hackers.
We should avoid calling sync_file_range or posix_fadvise in this case,
since (a) we don't really care if the data gets synced, and might as
well save the kernel calls; (b) at least on Linux we know that the
kernel might block us until it's scheduled the write.
Also, avoid making a useless second traversal of the directory tree
if we're not actually going to call fsync(2) after all.
Instead of having one hash table entry per relation/fork/segment, just have
one per relation, and use bitmapsets to represent which specific segments
need to be fsync'd. This eliminates the need to scan the whole hash table
to implement FORGET_RELATION_FSYNC, which fixes the O(N^2) behavior
recently demonstrated by Jeff Janes for cases involving lots of TRUNCATE or
DROP TABLE operations during a single checkpoint cycle. Per an idea from
Robert Haas.
(FORGET_DATABASE_FSYNC still sucks, but since dropping a database is a
pretty expensive operation anyway, we'll live with that.)
In passing, improve the delayed-unlink code: remove the pass over the list
in mdpreckpt, since it wasn't doing anything for us except supporting a
useless Assert in mdpostckpt, and fix mdpostckpt so that it will absorb
fsync requests every so often when clearing a large backlog of deletion
requests.
We were sending one per fork, but a little bit of refactoring allows us
to send just one request with forknum == InvalidForkNumber. This not only
reduces pressure on the shared-memory request queue, but saves repeated
traversals of the checkpointer's hash table.
mdinit() was misusing IsBootstrapProcessingMode() to decide whether to
create an fsync pending-operations table in the current process. This led
to creating a table not only in the startup and checkpointer processes as
intended, but also in the bgwriter process, not to mention other auxiliary
processes such as walwriter and walreceiver. Creation of the table in the
bgwriter is fatal, because it absorbs fsync requests that should have gone
to the checkpointer; instead they just sit in bgwriter local memory and are
never acted on. So writes performed by the bgwriter were not being fsync'd
which could result in data loss after an OS crash. I think there is no
live bug with respect to walwriter and walreceiver because those never
perform any writes of shared buffers; but the potential is there for
future breakage in those processes too.
To fix, make AuxiliaryProcessMain() export the current process's
AuxProcType as a global variable, and then make mdinit() test directly for
the types of aux process that should have a pendingOpsTable. Having done
that, we might as well also get rid of the random bool flags such as
am_walreceiver that some of the aux processes had grown. (Note that we
could not have fixed the bug by examining those variables in mdinit(),
because it's called from BaseInit() which is run by AuxiliaryProcessMain()
before entering any of the process-type-specific code.)
Back-patch to 9.2, where the problem was introduced by the split-up of
bgwriter and checkpointer processes. The bogus pendingOpsTable exists
in walwriter and walreceiver processes in earlier branches, but absent
any evidence that it causes actual problems there, I'll leave the older
branches alone.
In all branches back to 8.3, this patch fixes a questionable assumption in
CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue that there are
no uninitialized pad bytes in the request queue structs. This would only
cause trouble if (a) there were such pad bytes, which could happen in 8.4
and up if the compiler makes enum ForkNumber narrower than 32 bits, but
otherwise would require not-currently-planned changes in the widths of
other typedefs; and (b) the kernel has not uniformly initialized the
contents of shared memory to zeroes. Still, it seems a tad risky, and we
can easily remove any risk by pre-zeroing the request array for ourselves.
In addition to that, we need to establish a coding rule that struct
RelFileNode can't contain any padding bytes, since such structs are copied
into the request array verbatim. (There are other places that are assuming
this anyway, it turns out.)
In 9.1 and up, the risk was a bit larger because we were also effectively
assuming that struct RelFileNodeBackend contained no pad bytes, and with
fields of different types in there, that would be much easier to break.
However, there is no good reason to ever transmit fsync or delete requests
for temp files to the bgwriter/checkpointer, so we can revert the request
structs to plain RelFileNode, getting rid of the padding risk and saving
some marginal number of bytes and cycles in fsync queue manipulation while
we are at it. The savings might be more than marginal during deletion of
a temp relation, because the old code transmitted an entirely useless but
nonetheless expensive-to-process ForgetRelationFsync request to the
background process, and also had the background process perform the file
deletion even though that can safely be done immediately.
In addition, make some cleanup of nearby comments and small improvements to
the code in CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue.
Management of timeouts was getting a little cumbersome; what we
originally had was more than enough back when we were only concerned
about deadlocks and query cancel; however, when we added timeouts for
standby processes, the code got considerably messier. Since there are
plans to add more complex timeouts, this seems a good time to introduce
a central timeout handling module.
External modules register their timeout handlers during process
initialization, and later enable and disable them as they see fit using
a simple API; timeout.c is in charge of keeping track of which timeouts
are in effect at any time, installing a common SIGALRM signal handler,
and calling setitimer() as appropriate to ensure timely firing of
external handlers.
timeout.c additionally supports pluggable modules to add their own
timeouts, though this capability isn't exercised anywhere yet.
Additionally, as of this commit, walsender processes are aware of
timeouts; we had a preexisting bug there that made those ignore SIGALRM,
thus being subject to unhandled deadlocks, particularly during the
authentication phase. This has already been fixed in back branches in
commit 0bf8eb2a, which see for more details.
Main author: Zoltán Böszörményi
Some review and cleanup by Álvaro Herrera
Extensive reworking by Tom Lane
The Solaris Studio compiler warns about these instances, unlike more
mainstream compilers such as gcc. But manual inspection showed that
the code is clearly not reachable, and we hope no worthy compiler will
complain about removing this code.
Historically we have not worried about fsync'ing anything during initdb
(in fact, initdb intentionally passes -F to each backend launch to prevent
it from fsync'ing). But with filesystems getting more aggressive about
caching data, that's not such a good plan anymore. Make initdb do a pass
over the finished data directory tree to fsync everything. For testing
purposes, the -N/--nosync flag can be used to restore the old behavior.
Also, testing shows that on Linux, sync_file_range() is much faster than
posix_fadvise() for hinting to the kernel that an fsync is coming,
apparently because the latter blocks on a rather small request queue while
the former doesn't. So use this function if available in initdb, and also
in the backend's pg_flush_data() (where it currently will affect only the
speed of CREATE DATABASE's cloning step).
We will later make pg_regress invoke initdb with the --nosync flag
to avoid slowing down cases such as "make check" in contrib. But
let's not do so until we've shaken out any portability issues in this
patch.
Jeff Davis, reviewed by Andres Freund
This simplifies code that needs to do arithmetic on XLogRecPtrs.
To avoid changing on-disk format of data pages, the LSN on data pages is
still stored in the old format. That should keep pg_upgrade happy. However,
we have XLogRecPtrs embedded in the control file, and in the structs that
are sent over the replication protocol, so this changes breaks compatibility
of pg_basebackup and server. I didn't do anything about this in this patch,
per discussion on -hackers, the right thing to do would to be to change the
replication protocol to be architecture-independent, so that you could use
a newer version of pg_receivexlog, for example, against an older server
version.
This speeds up reassigning locks to the parent owner, when the transaction
holds a lot of locks, but only a few of them belong to the current resource
owner. This is particularly helps pg_dump when dumping a large number of
objects.
The cache can hold up to 15 locks in each resource owner. After that, the
cache is marked as overflowed, and we fall back to the old method of
scanning the whole local lock table. The tradeoff here is that the cache has
to be scanned whenever a lock is released, so if the cache is too large,
lock release becomes more expensive. 15 seems enough to cover pg_dump, and
doesn't have much impact on lock release.
Jeff Janes, reviewed by Amit Kapila and Heikki Linnakangas.
When HS startup is deferred because of overflowed subtransactions, ensure
that we re-initialize KnownAssignedXids for when both existing and incoming
snapshots have non-zero qualifying xids.
Fixes bug #6661 reported by Valentine Gogichashvili.
Analysis and fix by Andres Freund
This provides a speedup of about 4X when NBuffers is large enough.
There is also a useful reduction in sinval traffic, since we
only do CacheInvalidateSmgr() once not once per fork.
Simon Riggs, reviewed and somewhat revised by Tom Lane
DropRelFileNodeBuffers, DropDatabaseBuffers, FlushRelationBuffers, and
FlushDatabaseBuffers have to scan the whole shared_buffers pool because
we have no index structure that would find the target buffers any more
efficiently than that. This gets expensive with large NBuffers. We can
shave some cycles from these loops by prechecking to see if the current
buffer is interesting before we acquire the buffer header lock.
Ordinarily such a test would be unsafe, but in these cases it should be
safe because we are already assuming that the caller holds a lock that
prevents any new target pages from being loaded into the buffer pool
concurrently. Therefore, no buffer tag should be changing to a value of
interest, only away from a value of interest. So a false negative match
is impossible, while a false positive is safe because we'll recheck after
acquiring the buffer lock. Initial testing says that this speeds these
loops by a factor of 2X to 3X on common Intel hardware.
Patch for DropRelFileNodeBuffers by Jeff Janes (based on an idea of
Heikki's); extended to the remaining sequential scans by Tom Lane
First, the previous code failed to account for the fact that, during Hot
Standby operation, the startup process takes AccessExclusiveLocks on
relations without setting MyDatabaseId. This resulted in fast path
strong lock counts failing to be incremented with the startup process
took locks, which in turn allowed conflicting lock requests to succeed
when they should not have. Report by Erik Rijkers, diagnosis by Heikki
Linnakangas.
Second, LockReleaseAll() failed to honor the allLocks and lockmethodid
restrictions with respect to fast-path locks. It's not clear to me
whether this produces any user-visible breakage at the moment, but it's
certainly wrong. Rearrange order of operations in LockReleaseAll to fix.
Noted by Tom Lane.
In commit d526575f89, we changed things so
that buffer usage counts are incremented when the buffer is pinned, rather
than when it is unpinned, but the README file didn't get the memo.
Report by Amit Kapila.
When the "hot" members of PGPROC were split off to separate PGXACT structs,
many PGPROC fields referred to in comments were moved to PGXACT, but the
comments were neglected in the commit. Mostly this is just a search/replace
of PGPROC with PGXACT, but the way the dummy PGPROC entries are created for
prepared transactions changed more, making some of the comments totally
bogus.
Noah Misch
Commit 6d90eaaa89 added a hibernation mode
to the bgwriter to reduce the server's idle-power consumption. However,
its interaction with the detailed behavior of BgBufferSync's feedback
control loop wasn't very well thought out. That control loop depends
primarily on the rate of buffer allocation, not the rate of buffer
dirtying, so the hibernation mode has to be designed to operate only when
no new buffer allocations are happening. Also, the check for whether the
system is effectively idle was not quite right and would fail to detect
a constant low level of activity, thus allowing the bgwriter to go into
hibernation mode in a way that would let the cycle time vary quite a bit,
possibly further confusing the feedback loop. To fix, move the wakeup
support from MarkBufferDirty and SetBufferCommitInfoNeedsSave into
StrategyGetBuffer, and prevent the bgwriter from entering hibernation mode
unless no buffer allocations have happened recently.
In addition, fix the delaying logic to remove the problem of possibly not
responding to signals promptly, which was basically caused by trying to use
the process latch's is_set flag for multiple purposes. I can't prove it
but I'm suspicious that that hack was responsible for the intermittent
"postmaster does not shut down" failures we've been seeing in the buildfarm
lately. In any case it did nothing to improve the readability or
robustness of the code.
In passing, express the hibernation sleep time as a multiplier on
BgWriterDelay, not a constant. I'm not sure whether there's any value in
exposing the longer sleep time as an independently configurable setting,
but we can at least make it act like this for little extra code.
This patch modifies the walwriter process so that, when it has not found
anything useful to do for many consecutive wakeup cycles, it extends its
sleep time to reduce the server's idle power consumption. It reverts to
normal as soon as it's done any successful flushes. It's still true that
during any async commit, backends check for completed, unflushed pages of
WAL and signal the walwriter if there are any; so that in practice the
walwriter can get awakened and returned to normal operation sooner than the
sleep time might suggest.
Also, improve the checkpointer so that it uses a latch and a computed delay
time to not wake up at all except when it has something to do, replacing a
previous hardcoded 0.5 sec wakeup cycle. This also is primarily useful for
reducing the server's power consumption when idle.
In passing, get rid of the dedicated latch for signaling the walwriter in
favor of using its procLatch, since that comports better with possible
generic signal handlers using that latch. Also, fix a pre-existing bug
with failure to save/restore errno in walwriter's signal handlers.
Peter Geoghegan, somewhat simplified by Tom
Commit 62c7bd31c8 had assorted problems, most
visibly that it broke PREPARE TRANSACTION in the presence of session-level
advisory locks (which should be ignored by PREPARE), as per a recent
complaint from Stephen Rees. More abstractly, the patch made the
LockMethodData.transactional flag not merely useless but outright
dangerous, because in point of fact that flag no longer tells you anything
at all about whether a lock is held transactionally. This fix therefore
removes that flag altogether. We now rely entirely on the convention
already in use in lock.c that transactional lock holds must be owned by
some ResourceOwner, while session holds are never so owned. Setting the
locallock struct's owner link to NULL thus denotes a session hold, and
there is no redundant marker for that.
PREPARE TRANSACTION now works again when there are session-level advisory
locks, and it is also able to transfer transactional advisory locks to the
prepared transaction, but for implementation reasons it throws an error if
we hold both types of lock on a single lockable object. Perhaps it will be
worth improving that someday.
Assorted other minor cleanup and documentation editing, as well.
Back-patch to 9.1, except that in the 9.1 branch I did not remove the
LockMethodData.transactional flag for fear of causing an ABI break for
any external code that might be examining those structs.
The previous code could cause a backend crash after BEGIN; SAVEPOINT a;
LOCK TABLE foo (interrupted by ^C or statement timeout); ROLLBACK TO
SAVEPOINT a; LOCK TABLE foo, and might have leaked strong-lock counts
in other situations.
Report by Zoltán Böszörményi; patch review by Jeff Davis.
Ants Aasma's original patch to add timing information for buffer I/O
requests exposed this data at the relation level, which was judged too
costly. I've here exposed it at the database level instead.
Postmaster sets max_safe_fds by testing how many open file descriptors it
can open, and that is normally inherited by all child processes at fork().
Not so on EXEC_BACKEND, ie. Windows, however. Because of that, we
effectively ignored max_files_per_process on Windows, and always assumed
a conservative default of 32 simultaneous open files. That could have an
impact on performance, if you need to access a lot of different files
in a query. After this patch, the value is passed to child processes by
save/restore_backend_variables() among many other global variables.
It has been like this forever, but given the lack of complaints about it,
I'm not backpatching this.
Currently, the only way to see the numbers this gathers is via
EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS), but the plan is to add visibility through
the stats collector and pg_stat_statements in subsequent patches.
Ants Aasma, reviewed by Greg Smith, with some further changes by me.
For those variables only used when asserts are enabled, use a new
macro PG_USED_FOR_ASSERTS_ONLY, which expands to
__attribute__((unused)) when asserts are not enabled.
This allows loadable modules to get control at drop time, perhaps for the
purpose of performing additional security checks or to log the event.
The initial purpose of this code is to support sepgsql, but other
applications should be possible as well.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by me.
A prepared transaction can get new conflicts in and out after preparing, so
we cannot rely on the in- and out-flags stored in the statefile at prepare-
time. As a quick fix, make the conservative assumption that after a restart,
all prepared transactions are considered to have both in- and out-conflicts.
That can lead to unnecessary rollbacks after a crash, but that shouldn't be
a big problem in practice; you don't want prepared transactions to hang
around for a long time anyway.
Dan Ports
If LWLockWaitUntilFree was called before the first LWLockAcquire call, you
would either crash because of access to uninitialized array or account the
acquisition incorrectly. LWLockConditionalAcquire doesn't have this problem
because it doesn't update the lwlock stats.
In practice, this never happens because there is no codepath where you would
call LWLockWaitUntilfree before LWLockAcquire after a new process is
launched. But that's just accidental, there's no guarantee that that's
always going to be true in the future.
Spotted by Jeff Janes.
Originally, most of this code assumed that no Postgres backends could be
running concurrently with it, and so no locking could be needed. That
assumption fails in Hot Standby. While it's still true that Hot Standby
backends should never change values like nextXid, they can examine them,
and consistency is important in some cases such as when computing a
snapshot. Therefore, prudence requires that WAL replay code obtain the
relevant locks when modifying such variables, even though it can examine
them without taking a lock. We were following that coding rule in some
places but not all. This commit applies the coding rule uniformly to all
updates of ShmemVariableCache and MultiXactState fields; a search of the
replay routines did not find any other cases that seemed to be at risk.
In addition, this commit fixes a longstanding thinko in replay of NEXTOID
and checkpoint records: we tried to advance nextOid only if it was behind
the value in the WAL record, but the comparison would draw the wrong
conclusion if OID wraparound had occurred since the previous value.
Better to just unconditionally assign the new value, since OID assignment
shouldn't be happening during replay anyway.
The additional locking seems to be more in the nature of future-proofing
than fixing any live bug, so I am not going to back-patch it. The NEXTOID
fix will be back-patched separately.
All other WAL redo routines either call RestoreBkpBlocks() or Assert that
they haven't been passed any backup blocks. Make this one do likewise.
Also, fix incorrect routine name in its failure message.
If there was a wait-until-free process in the head of the wait queue,
followed by an exclusive locker, the exclusive locker was not be woken up
as it should.
When a backend needs to flush the WAL, and someone else is already flushing
the WAL, wait until it releases the WALInsertLock and check if we still need
to do the flush or if the other backend already did the work for us, before
acquiring WALInsertLock. This helps group commit, because when the WAL flush
finishes, all the backends that were waiting for it can be woken up in one
go, and the can all concurrently observe that they're done, rather than
waking them up one by one in a cascading fashion.
This is based on a new LWLock function, LWLockWaitUntilFree(), which has
peculiar semantics. If the lock is immediately free, it grabs the lock and
returns true. If it's not free, it waits until it is released, but then
returns false without grabbing the lock. This is used in XLogFlush(), so
that when the lock is acquired, the backend flushes the WAL, but if it's
not, the backend first checks the current flush location before retrying.
Original patch and benchmarking by Peter Geoghegan and Simon Riggs, although
this patch as committed ended up being very different from that.
