We've seen multiple cases of people looking at the postmaster's original
stderr output to try to diagnose problems, not realizing/remembering that
their logging configuration is set up to send log messages somewhere else.
This seems particularly likely to happen in prepackaged distributions,
since many packagers patch the code to change the factory-standard logging
configuration to something more in line with their platform conventions.
In hopes of reducing confusion, emit a LOG message about this at the point
in startup where we are about to switch log output away from the original
stderr, providing a pointer to where to look instead. This message will
appear as the last thing in the original stderr output. (We might later
also try to emit such link messages when logging parameters are changed
on-the-fly; but that case seems to be both noticeably harder to do nicely,
and much less frequently a problem in practice.)
Per discussion, back-patch to 9.3 but not further.
This is like shared_preload_libraries except that it takes effect at
backend start and can be changed without a full postmaster restart. It
is like local_preload_libraries except that it is still only settable by
a superuser. This can be a better way to load modules such as
auto_explain.
Since there are now three preload parameters, regroup the documentation
a bit. Put all parameters into one section, explain common
functionality only once, update the descriptions to reflect current and
future realities.
Reviewed-by: Dimitri Fontaine <dimitri@2ndQuadrant.fr>
This patch replaces WALInsertLock with a number of WAL insertion slots,
allowing multiple backends to insert WAL records to the WAL buffers
concurrently. This is particularly useful for parallel loading large amounts
of data on a system with many CPUs.
This has one user-visible change: switching to a new WAL segment with
pg_switch_xlog() now fills the remaining unused portion of the segment with
zeros. This potentially adds some overhead, but it has been a very common
practice by DBA's to clear the "tail" of the segment with an external
pg_clearxlogtail utility anyway, to make the WAL files compress better.
With this patch, it's no longer necessary to do that.
This patch adds a new GUC, xloginsert_slots, to tune the number of WAL
insertion slots. Performance testing suggests that the default, 8, works
pretty well for all kinds of worklods, but I left the GUC in place to allow
others with different hardware to test that easily. We might want to remove
that before release.
Reviewed by Andres Freund.
In 9.3, there's no particular limit on the number of bgworkers;
instead, we just count up the number that are actually registered,
and use that to set MaxBackends. However, that approach causes
problems for Hot Standby, which needs both MaxBackends and the
size of the lock table to be the same on the standby as on the
master, yet it may not be desirable to run the same bgworkers in
both places. 9.3 handles that by failing to notice the problem,
which will probably work fine in nearly all cases anyway, but is
not theoretically sound.
A further problem with simply counting the number of registered
workers is that new workers can't be registered without a
postmaster restart. This is inconvenient for administrators,
since bouncing the postmaster causes an interruption of service.
Moreover, there are a number of applications for background
processes where, by necessity, the background process must be
started on the fly (e.g. parallel query). While this patch
doesn't actually make it possible to register new background
workers after startup time, it's a necessary prerequisite.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier.
Checksums are set immediately prior to flush out of shared buffers
and checked when pages are read in again. Hint bit setting will
require full page write when block is dirtied, which causes various
infrastructure changes. Extensive comments, docs and README.
WARNING message thrown if checksum fails on non-all zeroes page;
ERROR thrown but can be disabled with ignore_checksum_failure = on.
Feature enabled by an initdb option, since transition from option off
to option on is long and complex and has not yet been implemented.
Default is not to use checksums.
Checksum used is WAL CRC-32 truncated to 16-bits.
Simon Riggs, Jeff Davis, Greg Smith
Wide input and assistance from many community members. Thank you.
Prior to 9.3 the commit_delay affected only the current user,
whereas now only the group leader waits while holding the
WALWriteLock. Deliberate or accidental settings to a poor
value could seriously degrade performance for all users.
Privileges may be delegated by SECURITY DEFINER functions
for anyone that needs per-user settings in real situations.
Request for change from Peter Geoghegan
This GUC allows limiting the time spent waiting to acquire any one
heavyweight lock.
In support of this, improve the recently-added timeout infrastructure
to permit efficiently enabling or disabling multiple timeouts at once.
That reduces the performance hit from turning on lock_timeout, though
it's still not zero.
Zoltán Böszörményi, reviewed by Tom Lane,
Stephen Frost, and Hari Babu
We now write one file per database and one global file, instead of
having the whole thing in a single huge file. This reduces the I/O that
must be done when partial data is required -- which is all the time,
because each process only needs information on its own database anyway.
Also, the autovacuum launcher does not need data about tables and
functions in each database; having the global stats for all DBs is
enough.
Catalog version bumped because we have a new subdir under PGDATA.
Author: Tomas Vondra. Some rework by Álvaro
Testing by Jeff Janes
Other discussion by Heikki Linnakangas, Tom Lane.
This generalizes the existing ALTER ROLE ... SET and ALTER DATABASE
... SET functionality to allow creating settings that apply to all users
in all databases.
reviewed by Pavel Stehule
It's better to start from what the OpenSSL people consider a good
default and then remove insecure things (low encryption, exportable
encryption and md5 at this point) from that, instead of starting
from everything that exists and remove from that. We trust the
OpenSSL people to make good choices about what the default is.
Commit da07a1e8 was broken for EXEC_BACKEND because I failed to realize
that the MaxBackends recomputation needed to be duplicated by
subprocesses in SubPostmasterMain. However, instead of having the value
be recomputed at all, it's better to assign the correct value at
postmaster initialization time, and have it be propagated to exec'ed
backends via BackendParameters.
MaxBackends stays as zero until after modules in
shared_preload_libraries have had a chance to register bgworkers, since
the value is going to be untrustworthy till that's finished.
Heikki Linnakangas and Álvaro Herrera
Background workers are postmaster subprocesses that run arbitrary
user-specified code. They can request shared memory access as well as
backend database connections; or they can just use plain libpq frontend
database connections.
Modules listed in shared_preload_libraries can register background
workers in their _PG_init() function; this is early enough that it's not
necessary to provide an extra GUC option, because the necessary extra
resources can be allocated early on. Modules can install more than one
bgworker, if necessary.
Care is taken that these extra processes do not interfere with other
postmaster tasks: only one such process is started on each ServerLoop
iteration. This means a large number of them could be waiting to be
started up and postmaster is still able to quickly service external
connection requests. Also, shutdown sequence should not be impacted by
a worker process that's reasonably well behaved (i.e. promptly responds
to termination signals.)
The current implementation lets worker processes specify their start
time, i.e. at what point in the server startup process they are to be
started: right after postmaster start (in which case they mustn't ask
for shared memory access), when consistent state has been reached
(useful during recovery in a HOT standby server), or when recovery has
terminated (i.e. when normal backends are allowed).
In case of a bgworker crash, actions to take depend on registration
data: if shared memory was requested, then all other connections are
taken down (as well as other bgworkers), just like it were a regular
backend crashing. The bgworker itself is restarted, too, within a
configurable timeframe (which can be configured to be never).
More features to add to this framework can be imagined without much
effort, and have been discussed, but this seems good enough as a useful
unit already.
An elementary sample module is supplied.
Author: Álvaro Herrera
This patch is loosely based on prior patches submitted by KaiGai Kohei,
and unsubmitted code by Simon Riggs.
Reviewed by: KaiGai Kohei, Markus Wanner, Andres Freund,
Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, Amit Kapila
The previous definitions of these GUC variables allowed them to range
up to INT_MAX, but in point of fact the underlying code would suffer
overflows or other errors with large values. Reduce the maximum values
to something that won't misbehave. There's no apparent value in working
harder than this, since very large delays aren't sensible for any of
these. (Note: the risk with archive_timeout is that if we're late
checking the state, the timestamp difference it's being compared to
might overflow. So we need some amount of slop; the choice of INT_MAX/2
is arbitrary.)
Per followup investigation of bug #7670. Although this isn't a very
significant fix, might as well back-patch.
We need to avoid calling WaitLatch with timeouts exceeding INT_MAX.
Fortunately a simple clamp will do the trick, since no harm is done if
the wait times out before it's really time to rotate the log file.
Per bug #7670 (probably bug #7545 is the same thing, too).
In passing, fix bogus definition of log_rotation_age's maximum value in
guc.c --- it was numerically right, but only because MINS_PER_HOUR and
SECS_PER_MINUTE have the same value.
Back-patch to 9.2. Before that, syslogger wasn't using WaitLatch.
Rename replication_timeout to wal_sender_timeout, and add a new setting
called wal_receiver_timeout that does the same at the walreceiver side.
There was previously no timeout in walreceiver, so if the network went down,
for example, the walreceiver could take a long time to notice that the
connection was lost. Now with the two settings, both sides of a replication
connection will detect a broken connection similarly.
It is no longer necessary to manually set wal_receiver_status_interval to
a value smaller than the timeout. Both wal sender and receiver now
automatically send a "ping" message if more than 1/2 of the configured
timeout has elapsed, and it hasn't received any messages from the other end.
Amit Kapila, heavily edited by me.
On some platforms these functions return NULL, rather than the more common
practice of returning a pointer to a zero-sized block of memory. Hack our
various wrapper functions to hide the difference by substituting a size
request of 1. This is probably not so important for the callers, who
should never touch the block anyway if they asked for size 0 --- but it's
important for the wrapper functions themselves, which mistakenly treated
the NULL result as an out-of-memory failure. This broke at least pg_dump
for the case of no user-defined aggregates, as per report from
Matthew Carrington.
Back-patch to 9.2 to fix the pg_dump issue. Given the lack of previous
complaints, it seems likely that there is no live bug in previous releases,
even though some of these functions were in place before that.
Replace unix_socket_directory with unix_socket_directories, which is a list
of socket directories, and adjust postmaster's code to allow zero or more
Unix-domain sockets to be created.
This is mostly a straightforward change, but since the Unix sockets ought
to be created after the TCP/IP sockets for safety reasons (better chance
of detecting a port number conflict), AddToDataDirLockFile needs to be
fixed to support out-of-order updates of data directory lockfile lines.
That's a change that had been foreseen to be necessary someday anyway.
Honza Horak, reviewed and revised by Tom Lane
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.
This allows changing the location of the files that were previously
hard-coded to server.crt, server.key, root.crt, root.crl.
server.crt and server.key continue to be the default settings and are
thus required to be present by default if SSL is enabled. But the
settings for the server-side CA and CRL are now empty by default, and
if they are set, the files are required to be present. This replaces
the previous behavior of ignoring the functionality if the files were
not found.
Base backup follows recommended procedure, plus goes to great
lengths to ensure that partial page writes are avoided.
Jun Ishizuka and Fujii Masao, with minor modifications
Replication occurs only to memory on standby, not to disk,
so provides additional performance if user wishes to
reduce durability level slightly. Adds concept of multiple
independent sync rep queues.
Fujii Masao and Simon Riggs