"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.)
The contents of an unlogged table are WAL-logged; thus, they are not
available on standby servers and are truncated whenever the database
system enters recovery. Indexes on unlogged tables are also unlogged.
Unlogged GiST indexes are not currently supported.
Recent versions of the Linux system header files cause xlogdefs.h to
believe that open_datasync should be the default sync method, whereas
formerly fdatasync was the default on Linux. open_datasync is a bad
choice, first because it doesn't actually outperform fdatasync (in fact
the reverse), and second because we try to use O_DIRECT with it, causing
failures on certain filesystems (e.g., ext4 with data=journal option).
This part of the patch is largely per a proposal from Marti Raudsepp.
More extensive changes are likely to follow in HEAD, but this is as much
change as we want to back-patch.
Also clean up confusing code and incorrect documentation surrounding the
fsync_writethrough option. Those changes shouldn't result in any actual
behavioral change, but I chose to back-patch them anyway to keep the
branches looking similar in this area.
In 9.0 and HEAD, also do some copy-editing on the WAL Reliability
documentation section.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since any of them might get used
on modern Linux versions.
The original coding in FileClose() reset the file-is-temp flag before
unlinking the file, so that if control came back through due to an error,
it wouldn't try to unlink the file twice. This was correct when written,
but when the log_temp_files feature was added, the logging action was put
in between those two steps. An error occurring during the logging action
--- such as a query cancel --- would result in the unlink not getting done
at all, as in recent report from Michael Glaesemann.
To fix this, make sure that we do both the stat and the unlink before doing
anything that could conceivably CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS. There is a judgment
call here, which is which log message to emit first: if you can see only
one, which should it be? I chose to log unlink failure at the risk of
losing the log_temp_files log message --- after all, if the unlink does
fail, the temp file is still there for you to see.
Back-patch to all versions that have log_temp_files. The code was OK
before that.
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.
Per extensive discussion on pgsql-hackers. We are deliberately not
back-patching this even though the behavior of 8.3 and 8.4 is
unquestionably broken, for fear of breaking existing users of this
parameter. This incompatibility should be release-noted.
on a platform that doesn't support this operation. The former coding
would allow an unrelated errno to be reported, which would be quite
misleading. Not sure if this has anything to do with the current
buildfarm failures, but it's certainly bogus as-is.
all the data and using posix_fadvise to nudge the OS into flushing it
earlier. This also hopefully makes CREATE DATABASE avoid spamming the
cache.
Tests show a big speedup on Linux at least on some filesystems.
Idea and patch from Andres Freund.
can upgrade clusters without renaming the tablespace directories. New
directory structure format is, e.g.:
$PGDATA/pg_tblspc/20981/PG_8.5_201001061/719849/83292814
in a subtransaction stays open even if the subtransaction is aborted, so
any temporary files related to it must stay alive as well. With the patch,
we use ResourceOwners to track open temporary files and don't automatically
close them at subtransaction end (though in the normal case temporary files
are registered with the subtransaction resource owner and will therefore be
closed).
At end of top transaction, we still check that there's no temporary files
marked as close-at-end-of-transaction open, but that's now just a debugging
cross-check as the resource owner cleanup should've closed them already.
fsync() fails, say "file" rather than "relation" when printing the filename.
This makes messages that display block numbers a bit confusing. For example,
in message 'could not read block 150000 of file "base/1234/5678.1"', 150000
is the block number from the beginning of the relation, ie. segment 0, not
150000th block within that segment. Per discussion, users aren't usually
interested in the exact location within the file, so we can live with that.
To ease constructing error messages, add FilePathName(File) function to
return the pathname of a virtual fd.
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
there are FD_XACT_TEMPORARY files to clean up at transaction end.
Per performance profiling results on AWeber's huge systems.
Patch by me after an idea suggested by Simon Riggs.
than dividing them into 1GB segments as has been our longtime practice. This
requires working support for large files in the operating system; at least for
the time being, it won't be the default.
Zdenek Kotala
with the recent patch to log temp file sizes at removal time. Doesn't seem
worth fixing since it's unused.
In passing, make a few elog messages conform to the message style guide.
for each temp file, rather than once per sort or hashjoin; this allows
spreading the data of a large sort or join across multiple tablespaces.
(I remain dubious that this will make any difference in practice, but certain
people insisted.) Arrange to cache the results of parsing the GUC variable
instead of recomputing from scratch on every demand, and push usage of the
cache down to the bottommost fd.c level.
tablespace(s) in which to store temp tables and temporary files. This is a
list to allow spreading the load across multiple tablespaces (a random list
element is chosen each time a temp object is to be created). Temp files are
not stored in per-database pgsql_tmp/ directories anymore, but per-tablespace
directories.
Jaime Casanova and Albert Cervera, with review by Bernd Helmle and Tom Lane.
Also add a retry for Unixen returning EINTR, which hasn't been reported
as an issue but at least theoretically could be. Patch by Qingqing Zhou,
some minor adjustments by me.
comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory. Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).
Backpatch to 8.1.X.
exit, instead of trying to take shortcuts. Introduce some additional
shutdown callback routines to eliminate kluges like having ProcKill
be responsible for shutting down the buffer manager. Ensure that the
order of operations during shutdown is predictable and what you would
expect given the module layering.
Alvaro Herrera
Bruce Momjian
Robert Haas
Tom Lane
Magnus Hagander
Greg Stark
Heikki Linnakangas
Peter Eisentraut