If an SMgrRelation is not "owned" by a relcache entry, don't allow it to
live past transaction end. This design allows the same SMgrRelation to be
used for blind writes of multiple blocks during a transaction, but ensures
that we don't hold onto such an SMgrRelation indefinitely. Because an
SMgrRelation typically corresponds to open file descriptors at the fd.c
level, leaving it open when there's no corresponding relcache entry can
mean that we prevent the kernel from reclaiming deleted disk space.
(While CacheInvalidateSmgr messages usually fix that, there are cases
where they're not issued, such as DROP DATABASE. We might want to add
some more sinval messaging for that, but I'd be inclined to keep this
type of logic anyway, since allowing VFDs to accumulate indefinitely
for blind-written relations doesn't seem like a good idea.)
This code replaces a previous attempt towards the same goal that proved
to be unreliable. Back-patch to 9.1 where the previous patch was added.
This reverts commit fba105b109.
That approach had problems with the smgr-level state not tracking what
we really want to happen, and with the VFD-level state not tracking the
smgr-level state very well either. In consequence, it was still possible
to hold kernel file descriptors open for long-gone tables (as in recent
report from Tore Halset), and yet there were also cases of FDs being closed
undesirably soon. A replacement implementation will follow.
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.
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
"Blind writes" are a mechanism to push buffers down to disk when
evicting them; since they may belong to different databases than the one
a backend is connected to, the backend does not necessarily have a
relation to link them to, and thus no way to blow them away. We were
keeping those files open indefinitely, which would cause a problem if
the underlying table was deleted, because the operating system would not
be able to reclaim the disk space used by those files.
To fix, have bufmgr mark such files as transient to smgr; the lower
layer is allowed to close the file descriptor when the current
transaction ends. We must be careful to have any other access of the
file to remove the transient markings, to prevent unnecessary expensive
system calls when evicting buffers belonging to our own database (which
files we're likely to require again soon.)
This commit fixes a bug in the previous one, which neglected to cleanly
handle the LRU ring that fd.c uses to manage open files, and caused an
unacceptable failure just before beta2 and was thus reverted.
"Blind writes" are a mechanism to push buffers down to disk when
evicting them; since they may belong to different databases than the one
a backend is connected to, the backend does not necessarily have a
relation to link them to, and thus no way to blow them away. We were
keeping those files open indefinitely, which would cause a problem if
the underlying table was deleted, because the operating system would not
be able to reclaim the disk space used by those files.
To fix, have bufmgr mark such files as transient to smgr; the lower
layer is allowed to close the file descriptor when the current
transaction ends. We must be careful to have any other access of the
file to remove the transient markings, to prevent unnecessary expensive
system calls when evicting buffers belonging to our own database (which
files we're likely to require again soon.)
This allows us to reliably remove all leftover temporary relation
files on cluster startup without reference to system catalogs or WAL;
therefore, we no longer include temporary relations in XLOG_XACT_COMMIT
and XLOG_XACT_ABORT WAL records.
Since these changes require including a backend ID in each
SharedInvalSmgrMsg, the size of the SharedInvalidationMessage.id
field has been reduced from two bytes to one, and the maximum number
of connections has been reduced from INT_MAX / 4 to 2^23-1. It would
be possible to remove these restrictions by increasing the size of
SharedInvalidationMessage by 4 bytes, but right now that doesn't seem
like a good trade-off.
Review by Jaime Casanova and Tom Lane.
Move rd_targblock, rd_fsm_nblocks, and rd_vm_nblocks from relcache to the smgr
relation entries, so that they will get reset to InvalidBlockNumber whenever
an smgr-level flush happens. Because we now send smgr invalidation messages
immediately (not at end of transaction) when a relation truncation occurs,
this ensures that other backends will reset their values before they next
access the relation. We no longer need the unreliable assumption that a
VACUUM that's doing a truncation will hold its AccessExclusive lock until
commit --- in fact, we can intentionally release that lock as soon as we've
completed the truncation. This patch therefore reverts (most of) Alvaro's
patch of 2009-11-10, as well as my marginal hacking on it yesterday. We can
also get rid of assorted no-longer-needed relcache flushes, which are far more
expensive than an smgr flush because they kill a lot more state.
In passing this patch fixes smgr_redo's failure to perform visibility-map
truncation, and cleans up some rather dubious assumptions in freespace.c and
visibilitymap.c about when rd_fsm_nblocks and rd_vm_nblocks can be out of
date.
during it:
When bgwriter is active, the startup process can't perform mdsync() correctly
because it won't see the fsync requests accumulated in bgwriter's private
pendingOpsTable. Therefore make bgwriter responsible for the end-of-recovery
checkpoint as well, when it's active.
When bgwriter is active (= archive recovery), the startup process must not
accumulate fsync requests to its own pendingOpsTable, since bgwriter won't
see them there when it performs restartpoints. Make startup process drop its
pendingOpsTable when bgwriter is launched to avoid that.
Update minimum recovery point one last time when leaving archive recovery.
It won't be updated by the end-of-recovery checkpoint because XLogFlush()
sees us as out of recovery already.
This fixes bug #4879 reported by Fujii Masao.
GUC variable effective_io_concurrency controls how many concurrent block
prefetch requests will be issued.
(The best way to handle this for plain index scans is still under debate,
so that part is not applied yet --- tgl)
Greg Stark
truncations in FSM code, call FreeSpaceMapTruncateRel from smgr_redo. To
make that cleaner from modularity point of view, move the WAL-logging one
level up to RelationTruncate, and move RelationTruncate and all the
related WAL-logging to new src/backend/catalog/storage.c file. Introduce
new RelationCreateStorage and RelationDropStorage functions that are used
instead of calling smgrcreate/smgrscheduleunlink directly. Move the
pending rel deletion stuff from smgrcreate/smgrscheduleunlink to the new
functions. This leaves smgr.c as a thin wrapper around md.c; all the
transactional stuff is now in storage.c.
This will make it easier to add new forks with similar truncation logic,
like the visibility map.
of multiple forks, and each fork can be created and grown separately.
The bulk of this patch is about changing the smgr API to include an extra
ForkNumber argument in every smgr function. Also, smgrscheduleunlink and
smgrdounlink no longer implicitly call smgrclose, because other forks might
still exist after unlinking one. The callers of those functions have been
modified to call smgrclose instead.
This patch in itself doesn't have any user-visible effect, but provides the
infrastructure needed for upcoming patches. The additional forks envisioned
are a rewritten FSM implementation that doesn't rely on a fixed-size shared
memory block, and a visibility map to allow skipping portions of a table in
VACUUM that have no dead tuples.
checkpoint. This guards against an unlikely data-loss scenario in which
we re-use the relfilenode, then crash, then replay the deletion and
recreation of the file. Even then we'd be OK if all insertions into the
new relation had been WAL-logged ... but that's not guaranteed given all
the no-WAL-logging optimizations that have recently been added.
Patch by Heikki Linnakangas, per a discussion last month.
rows will normally never obtain an XID at all. We already did things this way
for subtransactions, but this patch extends the concept to top-level
transactions. In applications where there are lots of short read-only
transactions, this should improve performance noticeably; not so much from
removal of the actual XID-assignments, as from reduction of overhead that's
driven by the rate of XID consumption. We add a concept of a "virtual
transaction ID" so that active transactions can be uniquely identified even
if they don't have a regular XID. This is a much lighter-weight concept:
uniqueness of VXIDs is only guaranteed over the short term, and no on-disk
record is made about them.
Florian Pflug, with some editorialization by Tom.
having md.c return a success/failure boolean to smgr.c, which was just going
to elog anyway, let md.c issue the elog messages itself. This allows better
error reporting, particularly in cases such as "short read" or "short write"
which Peter was complaining of. Also, remove the kluge of allowing mdread()
to return zeroes from a read-beyond-EOF: this is now an error condition
except when InRecovery or zero_damaged_pages = true. (Hash indexes used to
require that behavior, but no more.) Also, enforce that mdwrite() is to be
used for rewriting existing blocks while mdextend() is to be used for
extending the relation EOF. This restriction lets us get rid of the old
ad-hoc defense against creating huge files by an accidental reference to
a bogus block number: we'll only create new segments in mdextend() not
mdwrite() or mdread(). (Again, when InRecovery we allow it anyway, since
we need to allow updates of blocks that were later truncated away.)
Also, clean up the original makeshift patch for bug #2737: move the
responsibility for padding relation segments to full length into md.c.
when an error occurs during xlog replay. Also, replace the former risky
'write into a fixed-size buffer with no overflow detection' API for XLOG
record description routines; use an expansible StringInfo instead. (The
latter accounts for most of the patch bulk.)
Qingqing Zhou
is the minimum required fix. I want to look next at taking advantage of
it by simplifying the message semantics in the shared inval message queue,
but that part can be held over for 8.1 if it turns out too ugly.
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 ...
keep track of portal-related resources separately from transaction-related
resources. This allows cursors to work in a somewhat sane fashion with
nested transactions. For now, cursor behavior is non-subtransactional,
that is a cursor's state does not roll back if you abort a subtransaction
that fetched from the cursor. We might want to change that later.
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.
locking conflict against concurrent CHECKPOINT that was discussed a few
weeks ago. Also, if not using WAL archiving (which is always true ATM
but won't be if PITR makes it into this release), there's no need to
WAL-log the index build process; it's sufficient to force-fsync the
completed index before commit. This seems to gain about a factor of 2
in my tests, which is consistent with writing half as much data. I did
not try it with WAL on a separate drive though --- probably the gain would
be a lot less in that scenario.
temp tables, and avoid WAL-logging truncations of temp tables. Do issue
fsync on truncated files (not sure this is necessary but it seems like
a good idea).
explicitly fsync'ing every (non-temp) file we have written since the
last checkpoint. In the vast majority of cases, the burden of the
fsyncs should fall on the bgwriter process not on backends. (To this
end, we assume that an fsync issued by the bgwriter will force out
blocks written to the same file by other processes using other file
descriptors. Anyone have a problem with that?) This makes the world
safe for WIN32, which ain't even got sync(2), and really makes the world
safe for Unixen as well, because sync(2) never had the semantics we need:
it offers no way to wait for the requested I/O to finish.
Along the way, fix a bug I recently introduced in xlog recovery:
file truncation replay failed to clear bufmgr buffers for the dropped
blocks, which could result in 'PANIC: heap_delete_redo: no block'
later on in xlog replay.
wit: Add a header record to each WAL segment file so that it can be reliably
identified. Avoid splitting WAL records across segment files (this is not
strictly necessary, but makes it simpler to incorporate the header records).
Make WAL entries for file creation, deletion, and truncation (as foreseen but
never implemented by Vadim). Also, add support for making XLOG_SEG_SIZE
configurable at compile time, similarly to BLCKSZ. Fix a couple bugs I
introduced in WAL replay during recent smgr API changes. initdb is forced
due to changes in pg_control contents.
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.
Remove the 'strategy map' code, which was a large amount of mechanism
that no longer had any use except reverse-mapping from procedure OID to
strategy number. Passing the strategy number to the index AM in the
first place is simpler and faster.
This is a preliminary step in planned support for cross-datatype index
operations. I'm committing it now since the ScanKeyEntryInitialize()
API change touches quite a lot of files, and I want to commit those
changes before the tree drifts under me.
The local buffer manager is no longer used for newly-created relations
(unless they are TEMP); a new non-TEMP relation goes through the shared
bufmgr and thus will participate normally in checkpoints. But TEMP relations
use the local buffer manager throughout their lifespan. Also, operations
in TEMP relations are not logged in WAL, thus improving performance.
Since it's no longer necessary to fsync relations as they move out of the
local buffers into shared buffers, quite a lot of smgr.c/md.c/fd.c code
is no longer needed and has been removed: there's no concept of a dirty
relation anymore in md.c/fd.c, and we never fsync anything but WAL.
Still TODO: improve local buffer management algorithms so that it would
be reasonable to increase NLocBuffer.
