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.
Add counters for number and size of temporary files used
for spill-to-disk queries for each database to the
pg_stat_database view.
Tomas Vondra, review by Magnus Hagander
This separates the state (running/idle/idleintransaction etc) into
it's own field ("state"), and leaves the query field containing just
query text.
The query text will now mean "current query" when a query is running
and "last query" in other states. Accordingly,the field has been
renamed from current_query to query.
Since backwards compatibility was broken anyway to make that, the procpid
field has also been renamed to pid - along with the same field in
pg_stat_replication for consistency.
Scott Mead and Magnus Hagander, review work from Greg Smith
This greatly reduces the WAL volume, especially when the table is narrow.
The overhead of locking the heap page is also reduced. Reduced WAL traffic
also makes it scale a lot better, if you run multiple COPY processes at
the same time.
Avoid possibly dumping core when pgstat_track_activity_query_size has a
less-than-default value; avoid uselessly searching for the query string
of a successfully-exited backend; don't bother putting out an ERRDETAIL if
we don't have a query to show; some other minor stylistic improvements.
To avoid minimize risk inside the postmaster, we subject this feature
to a number of significant limitations. We very much wish to avoid
doing any complex processing inside the postmaster, due to the
posssibility that the crashed backend has completely corrupted shared
memory. To that end, no encoding conversion is done; instead, we just
replace anything that doesn't look like an ASCII character with a
question mark. We limit the amount of data copied to 1024 characters,
and carefully sanity check the source of that data. While these
restrictions would doubtless be unacceptable in a general-purpose
logging facility, even this limited facility seems like an improvement
over the status quo ante.
Marti Raudsepp, reviewed by PDXPUG and myself
This is merely an exercise in satisfying pedants, not a bug fix, because
in every case we were checking for failure later with ferror(), or else
there was nothing useful to be done about a failure anyway. Document
the latter cases.
This reverts commit 79b2ee20c8, which proved
to not be very informative; it looks like the "pgstat wait timeout"
warnings in the buildfarm are just a symptom of running on heavily loaded
machines, and there isn't any weird mechanism causing them to appear.
To try to reduce the frequency of buildfarm failures from this effect,
increase PGSTAT_MAX_WAIT_TIME from 5 seconds to 10.
Also, arrange to not send a fresh inquiry message every single time through
the loop, as that seems more likely to cause problems (by swamping the
collector) than fix them. We'll now send an inquiry the first time through
the delay loop, and every 640 msec thereafter.
As per my recent proposal, this refactors things so that these typedefs and
macros are available in a header that can be included in frontend-ish code.
I also changed various headers that were undesirably including
utils/timestamp.h to include datatype/timestamp.h instead. Unsurprisingly,
this showed that half the system was getting utils/timestamp.h by way of
xlog.h.
No actual code changes here, just header refactoring.
This is in hopes of learning more about what causes "pgstat wait timeout"
warnings in the buildfarm. This patch should probably be reverted once
we've learned what we can. As coded, it will result in regression test
"failures" at half the delay that the existing code does, so I expect
to see a few more than before.
detect postmaster death. Postmaster keeps the write-end of the pipe open,
so when it dies, children get EOF in the read-end. That can conveniently
be waited for in select(), which allows eliminating some of the polling
loops that check for postmaster death. This patch doesn't yet change all
the loops to use the new mechanism, expect a follow-on patch to do that.
This changes the interface to WaitLatch, so that it takes as argument a
bitmask of events that it waits for. Possible events are latch set, timeout,
postmaster death, and socket becoming readable or writeable.
The pipe method behaves slightly differently from the kill() method
previously used in PostmasterIsAlive() in the case that postmaster has died,
but its parent has not yet read its exit code with waitpid(). The pipe
returns EOF as soon as the process dies, but kill() continues to return
true until waitpid() has been called (IOW while the process is a zombie).
Because of that, change PostmasterIsAlive() to use the pipe too, otherwise
WaitLatch() would return immediately with WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH, while
PostmasterIsAlive() would claim it's still alive. That could easily lead to
busy-waiting while postmaster is in zombie state.
Peter Geoghegan with further changes by me, reviewed by Fujii Masao and
Florian Pflug.
When we added the ability for vacuum to skip heap pages by consulting the
visibility map, we made it just not update the reltuples/relpages
statistics if it skipped any pages. But this could leave us with extremely
out-of-date stats for a table that contains any unchanging areas,
especially for TOAST tables which never get processed by ANALYZE. In
particular this could result in autovacuum making poor decisions about when
to process the table, as in recent report from Florian Helmberger. And in
general it's a bad idea to not update the stats at all. Instead, use the
previous values of reltuples/relpages as an estimate of the tuple density
in unvisited pages. This approach results in a "moving average" estimate
of reltuples, which should converge to the correct value over multiple
VACUUM and ANALYZE cycles even when individual measurements aren't very
good.
This new method for updating reltuples is used by both VACUUM and ANALYZE,
with the result that we no longer need the grotty interconnections that
caused ANALYZE to not update the stats depending on what had happened
in the parent VACUUM command.
Also, fix the logic for skipping all-visible pages during VACUUM so that it
looks ahead rather than behind to decide what to do, as per a suggestion
from Greg Stark. This eliminates useless scanning of all-visible pages at
the start of the relation or just after a not-all-visible page. In
particular, the first few pages of the relation will not be invariably
included in the scanned pages, which seems to help in not overweighting
them in the reltuples estimate.
Back-patch to 8.4, where the visibility map was introduced.
Tracks one counter for each database, which is reset whenever
the statistics for any individual object inside the database is
reset, and one counter for the background writer.
Tomas Vondra, reviewed by Greg Smith
We were failing to zero out some pg_stat_database counters that have
been added since the initial pgstats coding. This is a bug, but not
back-patching the fix since changing this behavior in a minor release
seems a cure worse than the disease.
Report and patch by Tomas Vondra.
This new field counts the number of times that a backend which writes a
buffer out to the OS must also fsync() it. This happens when the
bgwriter fsync request queue is full, and is generally detrimental to
performance, so it's good to know when it's happening. Along the way,
log a new message at level DEBUG1 whenever we fail to hand off an fsync,
so that the problem can also be seen in examination of log files
(if the logging level is cranked up high enough).
Greg Smith, with minor tweaks by me.
We may as well make pgstat_count_heap_scan() and related macros just count
whenever rel->pgstat_info isn't null. Testing pgstat_track_counts buys
nothing at all in the normal case where that flag is ON; and when it's OFF,
the pgstat_info link will be null, so it's still a useless test.
This change is unlikely to buy any noticeable performance improvement,
but a cycle shaved is a cycle earned; and my investigations earlier today
convinced me that we're down to the point where individual instructions in
the inner execution loops are starting to matter.
statistics counts. These numbers are being accumulated but haven't yet been
transmitted to the collector (and won't be, until the transaction ends).
For some purposes, though, it's handy to be able to look at them.
Joel Jacobson, reviewed by Itagaki Takahiro
unable to read a stats file for reasons other than ENOENT, and having to reset
last_statrequest because it's later than current time in the collector.
Not clear if this will shed any light on the "pgstat wait timeout" business,
but it seems like a good idea in general.
In passing, do some message-style-police work on recently-added
pgstat_reset_shared_counters code.
This silences some warnings on Win64. Not using the proper SOCKET datatype
was actually wrong on Win32 as well, but didn't cause any warnings there.
Also create define PGINVALID_SOCKET to indicate an invalid/non-existing
socket, instead of using a hardcoded -1 value.
decisions about when to auto-analyze.
The previous code depended on n_live_tuples + n_dead_tuples - last_anl_tuples,
where all three of these numbers could be bad estimates from ANALYZE itself.
Even worse, in the presence of a steady flow of HOT updates and matching
HOT-tuple reclamations, auto-analyze might never trigger at all, even if all
three numbers are exactly right, because n_dead_tuples could hold steady.
To fix, replace last_anl_tuples with an accurately tracked count of the total
number of committed tuple inserts + updates + deletes since the last ANALYZE
on the table. This can still be compared to the same threshold as before, but
it's much more trustworthy than the old computation. Tracking this requires
one more intra-transaction counter per modified table within backends, but no
additional memory space in the stats collector. There probably isn't any
measurable speed difference; if anything it might be a bit faster than before,
since I was able to eliminate some per-tuple arithmetic operations in favor of
adding sums once per (sub)transaction.
Also, simplify the logic around pgstat vacuum and analyze reporting messages
by not trying to fold VACUUM ANALYZE into a single pgstat message.
The original thought behind this patch was to allow scheduling of analyzes
on parent tables by artificially inflating their changes_since_analyze count.
I've left that for a separate patch since this change seems to stand on its
own merit.
The temporary hash tables made by pgstat_collect_oids should be allocated
in a short-term memory context, which is not the default behavior of
hash_create. Noted while looking through hash_create calls in connection
with Robert Haas' recent complaint.
This is a pre-existing bug, but it doesn't seem important enough to
back-patch. The hash table is not so large that it would matter unless this
happened many times within a session, which seems quite unlikely.
Formerly, these message types would be discarded unless there was already
a stats hash table entry for the target table. However, the intent of
saving hash table space for unused tables was subverted by the fact that
the physical I/O done by the vacuum or analyze would result in an immediately
following tabstat message, which would create the hash table entry anyway.
All that we had left was surprising loss of statistical data, as in a recent
complaint from Jaime Casanova.
It seems unlikely that a real database would have many tables that go totally
untouched over the long haul, so the consensus is that this "optimization"
serves little purpose anyhow. Remove it, and just create the hash table
entry on demand in all cases.
To make this work in the base case, pg_database now has a nailed-in-cache
relation descriptor that is initialized using hardwired knowledge in
relcache.c. This means pg_database is added to the set of relations that
need to have a Schema_pg_xxx macro maintained in pg_attribute.h. When this
path is taken, we'll have to do a seqscan of pg_database to find the row
we need.
In the normal case, we are able to do an indexscan to find the database's row
by name. This is made possible by storing a global relcache init file that
describes only the shared catalogs and their indexes (and therefore is usable
by all backends in any database). A new backend loads this cache file,
finds its database OID after an indexscan on pg_database, and then loads
the local relcache init file for that database.
This change should effectively eliminate number of databases as a factor
in backend startup time, even with large numbers of databases. However,
the real reason for doing it is as a first step towards getting rid of
the flat files altogether. There are still several other sub-projects
to be tackled before that can happen.
behavior in cases where we don't know the heap tuple count accurately; in
particular partial vacuum, but this also makes the API a bit more useful
for ANALYZE. This patch adds "estimated_count" flags to both structs so
that an approximate count can be flagged as such, and adjusts the logic
so that approximate counts are not used for updating pg_class.reltuples.
This fixes my previous complaint that VACUUM was putting ridiculous values
into pg_class.reltuples for indexes. The actual impact of that bug is
limited, because the planner only pays attention to reltuples for an index
if the index is partial; which probably explains why beta testers hadn't
noticed a degradation in plan quality from it. But it needs to be fixed.
The whole thing is a bit messy and should be redesigned in future, because
reltuples now has the potential to drift quite far away from reality when
a long period elapses with no non-partial vacuums. But this is as good as
it's going to get for 8.4.
skipped. We could update relpages anyway, but it seems better to only
update it together with reltuples, because we use the reltuples/relpages
ratio in the planner. Also don't update n_live_tuples in pgstat.
ANALYZE in VACUUM ANALYZE now needs to update pg_class, if the
VACUUM-phase didn't do so. Added some boolean-passing to let analyze_rel
know if it should update pg_class or not.
I also moved the relcache invalidation (to update rd_targblock) from
vac_update_relstats to where RelationTruncate is called, because
vac_update_relstats is not called for partial vacuums anymore. It's more
obvious to send the invalidation close to the truncation that requires it.
Per report by Ned T. Crigler.
where no function stats entries exist. Partial response to Pavel's
observation that small VACUUM operations are noticeably slower in CVS HEAD
than 8.3.
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Magnus Hagander
Bruce Momjian
Heikki Linnakangas