Commits fdd965d07 and 3cd9c3b92 tested CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY by
launching two separate pgbench runs concurrently. This was needed so
that only a single client thread would run CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY,
avoiding deadlock between two CICs. However, there's a better way,
which is to use an advisory lock to prevent concurrent CICs. That's
better in part because the test code is shorter and more readable, but
mostly because it automatically scales things to launch an appropriate
number of CICs relative to the number of INSERT transactions.
As committed, typically half to three-quarters of the CIC transactions
were pointless because the INSERT transactions had already stopped.
In passing, remove background_pgbench, which was added to support
these tests and isn't needed anymore. We can always put it back
if we find a use for it later.
Back-patch to v12; older pgbench versions lack the
conditional-execution features needed for this method.
Tom Lane and Andrey Borodin
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/139687.1635277318@sss.pgh.pa.us
CIC and REINDEX CONCURRENTLY assume backends see their catalog changes
no later than each backend's next transaction start. That failed to
hold when a backend absorbed a relevant invalidation in the middle of
running RelationBuildDesc() on the CIC index. Queries that use the
resulting index can silently fail to find rows. Fix this for future
index builds by making RelationBuildDesc() loop until it finishes
without accepting a relevant invalidation. It may be necessary to
reindex to recover from past occurrences; REINDEX CONCURRENTLY suffices.
Back-patch to 9.6 (all supported versions).
Noah Misch and Andrey Borodin, reviewed (in earlier versions) by Andres
Freund.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20210730022548.GA1940096@gust.leadboat.com
Tom Lane
Noah Misch