The simplest way to handle this is just to copy-and-paste the relevant
code block in fork_process.c, so that's what I did. (It's possible that
something more complicated would be useful to packagers who want to work
with either the old or the new API; but at this point the number of such
people is rapidly approaching zero, so let's just get the minimal thing
done.) Update relevant documentation as well.
Re-implements similar functionality in 9.1 and previously which
was removed during split of checkpointer and bgwriter.
Requested/spotted by Magnus Hagander
There is no reason to do this as early as possible in postmaster startup,
and good reason not to do it until we have completely created the
postmaster's lock file, namely that it might contribute to pg_ctl thinking
that postmaster startup has timed out. (This would require a rather
unusual amount of time to be spent scanning temp file directories, but we
have at least one field report of it happening reproducibly.)
Back-patch to 9.1. Before that, pg_ctl didn't wait for additional info to
be added to the lock file, so it wasn't a problem.
Note that this is not a complete fix to the slow-start issue in 9.1,
because we still had identify_system_timezone being run during postmaster
start in 9.1. But that's at least a reasonably well-defined delay, with
an easy workaround if needed, whereas the temp-files scan is not so
predictable and cannot be avoided.
We have no need for a timeout here really, but some broken products from
Redmond seem to lose FD_READ events occasionally, and waking up and
retrying the recv() is the only known way to work around that. Perhaps
somebody will be motivated to figure out a better answer here; but not I.
Test results from buildfarm members mastodon/narwhal (Windows Server 2003)
make it look like that platform just plain loses FD_READ events
occasionally, and the only reason our previous coding seemed to work was
that it timed out every couple of seconds and retried the whole operation.
Try to verify this by reinserting a finite timeout into the pgstat loop.
This isn't meant to be a permanent patch either, just to confirm or
disprove a theory.
This should get rid of the usage of pgwin32_waitforsinglesocket entirely,
and perhaps thereby remove the race condition that's evidently still
present on some versions of Windows. The previous arrangement was a bit
unsafe anyway, since waiting at the recv() would not allow pgstat to notice
postmaster death.
When the "hot" members of PGPROC were split off to separate PGXACT structs,
many PGPROC fields referred to in comments were moved to PGXACT, but the
comments were neglected in the commit. Mostly this is just a search/replace
of PGPROC with PGXACT, but the way the dummy PGPROC entries are created for
prepared transactions changed more, making some of the comments totally
bogus.
Noah Misch
Log main-loop blocking events and the results of inquiry messages.
This is to get some clarity as to what's happening on those Windows
buildfarm members that still don't like the latch-ified stats collector.
This bulks up the postmaster log a tad, so I won't leave it in place for
long.
This reverts commit cb2f2873d6, restoring
the latch-ified stats collector logic. We'll soon see if this works any
better on the Windows buildfarm machines.
syslogger was coded to wake up once per second whether there was anything
useful to do or not. As part of our campaign to reduce the server's idle
power consumption, change it to use a latch for waiting. Now, in the
absence of any data to log or any signals to service, it will only wake up
at the programmed logfile rotation times (if any).
This patch reverts commit 49340037ee and some
follow-on tweaking in pgstat.c. While the basic scheme of latch-ifying the
stats collector seems sound enough, it's failing on most Windows buildfarm
members for unknown reasons, and there's no time left to debug that before
9.2beta1. Better to ship a beta version without this improvement. I hope
to re-revert this once beta1 is out, though.
Per a suggestion from Peter Geoghegan, make WaitLatch responsible for
verifying that the WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH bit it returns is truthful (by
testing PostmasterIsAlive). Then simplify its callers, who no longer
need to do that for themselves. Remove weasel wording about falsely-set
result bits from WaitLatch's API contract.
In checkpointer and walwriter, avoid calling PostmasterIsAlive unless
WaitLatch has reported WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH. This saves a kernel call per
iteration of the process's outer loop, which is not all that much, but a
cycle shaved is a cycle earned. I had already removed the unconditional
PostmasterIsAlive calls in bgwriter and pgstat in previous patches, but
forgot that WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH is supposed to be treated as untrustworthy
(per comment in unix_latch.c); so adjust those two cases to match.
There are a few other places where the same idea might be applied, but only
after substantial code rearrangement, so I didn't bother.
Get rid of some more naming choices that only make sense if you know that
this code used to be in the bgwriter, as well as some stray comments
referencing the bgwriter.
Commit 6d90eaaa89 added a hibernation mode
to the bgwriter to reduce the server's idle-power consumption. However,
its interaction with the detailed behavior of BgBufferSync's feedback
control loop wasn't very well thought out. That control loop depends
primarily on the rate of buffer allocation, not the rate of buffer
dirtying, so the hibernation mode has to be designed to operate only when
no new buffer allocations are happening. Also, the check for whether the
system is effectively idle was not quite right and would fail to detect
a constant low level of activity, thus allowing the bgwriter to go into
hibernation mode in a way that would let the cycle time vary quite a bit,
possibly further confusing the feedback loop. To fix, move the wakeup
support from MarkBufferDirty and SetBufferCommitInfoNeedsSave into
StrategyGetBuffer, and prevent the bgwriter from entering hibernation mode
unless no buffer allocations have happened recently.
In addition, fix the delaying logic to remove the problem of possibly not
responding to signals promptly, which was basically caused by trying to use
the process latch's is_set flag for multiple purposes. I can't prove it
but I'm suspicious that that hack was responsible for the intermittent
"postmaster does not shut down" failures we've been seeing in the buildfarm
lately. In any case it did nothing to improve the readability or
robustness of the code.
In passing, express the hibernation sleep time as a multiplier on
BgWriterDelay, not a constant. I'm not sure whether there's any value in
exposing the longer sleep time as an independently configurable setting,
but we can at least make it act like this for little extra code.
Users of asynchronous-commit mode expect there to be a guaranteed maximum
delay before an async commit's WAL records get flushed to disk. The
original version of the walwriter hibernation patch broke that. Add an
extra shared-memory flag to allow async commits to kick the walwriter out
of hibernation mode, without adding any noticeable overhead in cases where
no action is needed.
Latch-ify the stats collector, so that it does not need an arbitrary wakeup
cycle to check for postmaster death. The incremental savings in idle power
is pretty marginal, since we only had it waking every two seconds; but I
believe that this patch may also improve the collector's performance under
load, by reducing the number of kernel calls made per message when messages
are arriving constantly (we now avoid a select/poll call except when we
need to sleep). The change also reduces the time needed for a normal
database shutdown on platforms where signals don't interrupt select().
This patch modifies the walwriter process so that, when it has not found
anything useful to do for many consecutive wakeup cycles, it extends its
sleep time to reduce the server's idle power consumption. It reverts to
normal as soon as it's done any successful flushes. It's still true that
during any async commit, backends check for completed, unflushed pages of
WAL and signal the walwriter if there are any; so that in practice the
walwriter can get awakened and returned to normal operation sooner than the
sleep time might suggest.
Also, improve the checkpointer so that it uses a latch and a computed delay
time to not wake up at all except when it has something to do, replacing a
previous hardcoded 0.5 sec wakeup cycle. This also is primarily useful for
reducing the server's power consumption when idle.
In passing, get rid of the dedicated latch for signaling the walwriter in
favor of using its procLatch, since that comports better with possible
generic signal handlers using that latch. Also, fix a pre-existing bug
with failure to save/restore errno in walwriter's signal handlers.
Peter Geoghegan, somewhat simplified by Tom
This patch adjusts the core statistics views to match the decision already
taken for pg_stat_statements, that values representing elapsed time should
be represented as float8 and measured in milliseconds. By using float8,
we are no longer tied to a specific maximum precision of timing data.
(Internally, it's still microseconds, but we could now change that without
needing changes at the SQL level.)
The columns affected are
pg_stat_bgwriter.checkpoint_write_time
pg_stat_bgwriter.checkpoint_sync_time
pg_stat_database.blk_read_time
pg_stat_database.blk_write_time
pg_stat_user_functions.total_time
pg_stat_user_functions.self_time
pg_stat_xact_user_functions.total_time
pg_stat_xact_user_functions.self_time
The first four of these are new in 9.2, so there is no compatibility issue
from changing them. The others require a release note comment that they
are now double precision (and can show a fractional part) rather than
bigint as before; also their underlying statistics functions now match
the column definitions, instead of returning bigint microseconds.
If it fails to open a new log file, the syslogger assumes there's something
wrong with its parameters (such as log_directory), and stops attempting
automatic time-based or size-based log file rotations. Sending it SIGHUP
is supposed to start that up again. However, the original coding for that
was really bogus, involving clobbering a couple of GUC variables and hoping
that SIGHUP processing would restore them. Get rid of that technique in
favor of maintaining a separate flag showing we've turned rotation off.
Per report from Mark Kirkwood.
Also, the syslogger will automatically attempt to create the log_directory
directory if it doesn't exist, but that was only happening at startup.
For consistency and ease of use, it should do the same whenever the value
of log_directory is changed by SIGHUP.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
We used to only initialize the stack base pointer when starting up a regular
backend, not in other processes. In particular, autovacuum workers can run
arbitrary user code, and without stack-depth checking, infinite recursion
in e.g an index expression will bring down the whole cluster.
The comment about PL/Java using set_stack_base() is not yet true. As the
code stands, PL/java still modifies the stack_base_ptr variable directly.
However, it's been discussed in the PL/Java mailing list that it should be
changed to use the function, because PL/Java is currently oblivious to the
register stack used on Itanium. There's another issues with PL/Java, namely
that the stack base pointer it sets is not really the base of the stack, it
could be something close to the bottom of the stack. That's a separate issue
that might need some further changes to this code, but that's a different
story.
Backpatch to all supported releases.
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.
The original coding of the syslogger had an arbitrary limit of 20 large
messages concurrently in progress, after which it would just punt and dump
message fragments to the output file separately. Our ambitions are a bit
higher than that now, so allow the data structure to expand as necessary.
Reported and patched by Andrew Dunstan; some editing by Tom
Postmaster sets max_safe_fds by testing how many open file descriptors it
can open, and that is normally inherited by all child processes at fork().
Not so on EXEC_BACKEND, ie. Windows, however. Because of that, we
effectively ignored max_files_per_process on Windows, and always assumed
a conservative default of 32 simultaneous open files. That could have an
impact on performance, if you need to access a lot of different files
in a query. After this patch, the value is passed to child processes by
save/restore_backend_variables() among many other global variables.
It has been like this forever, but given the lack of complaints about it,
I'm not backpatching this.
The postmaster was coded to treat any unexpected exit of the startup
process (i.e., the WAL replay process) as a catastrophic crash, and not try
to restart it. This was OK so long as the startup process could not have
any sibling postmaster children. However, if a hot-standby backend
crashes, we SIGQUIT the startup process along with everything else, and the
resulting exit is hardly "unexpected". Treating it as such meant we failed
to restart a standby server after any child crash at all, not only a crash
of the WAL replay process as intended. Adjust that. Back-patch to 9.0
where hot standby was introduced.
To make it wake up promptly when activity starts again, backends nudge it
by setting a latch in MarkBufferDirty(). The latch is kept set while
bgwriter is active, so there is very little overhead from that when the
system is busy. It is only armed before going into longer sleep.
Peter Geoghegan, with some changes by me.
This doesn't do anything useful just yet, but is intended as supporting
infrastructure for allowing sepgsql to sensibly check DROP permissions.
KaiGai Kohei and Robert Haas
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
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
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
Force the transaction isolation level to READ COMMITTED in autovacuum
worker and launcher processes. There is no benefit to using a higher
isolation level, and doing so could result in delaying foreground
transactions (or maybe even causing unnecessary serialization failures?).
Noted by Dan Ports.
Also, make sure we disable zero_damaged_pages and statement_timeout in
the autovac launcher, not only workers. Now that the launcher can run
transactions, these settings could affect its behavior, and it seems
like the same arguments apply to the launcher as the workers.
This speeds up snapshot-taking and reduces ProcArrayLock contention.
Also, the PGPROC (and PGXACT) structures used by two-phase commit are
now allocated as part of the main array, rather than in a separate
array, and we keep ProcArray sorted in pointer order. These changes
are intended to minimize the number of cache lines that must be pulled
in to take a snapshot, and testing shows a substantial increase in
performance on both read and write workloads at high concurrencies.
Pavan Deolasee, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
Previously we waited for wal_writer_delay before flushing WAL. Now
we also wake WALWriter as soon as a WAL buffer page has filled.
Significant effect observed on performance of asynchronous commits
by Robert Haas, attributed to the ability to set hint bits on tuples
earlier and so reducing contention caused by clog lookups.
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.
bgwriter is now a much less important process, responsible for page
cleaning duties only. checkpointer is now responsible for checkpoints
and so has a key role in shutdown. Later patches will correct doc
references to the now old idea that bgwriter performs checkpoints.
Has beneficial effect on performance at high write rates, but mainly
refactoring to more easily allow changes for power reduction by
simplifying previously tortuous code around required to allow page
cleaning and checkpointing to time slice in the same process.
Patch by me, Review by Dickson Guedes
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.
This addresses only those cases that are easy to fix by adding or
moving a const qualifier or removing an unnecessary cast. There are
many more complicated cases remaining.
We were doing some amazingly complicated things in order to avoid running
the very expensive identify_system_timezone() procedure during GUC
initialization. But there is an obvious fix for that, which is to do it
once during initdb and have initdb install the system-specific default into
postgresql.conf, as it already does for most other GUC variables that need
system-environment-dependent defaults. This means that the timezone (and
log_timezone) settings no longer have any magic behavior in the server.
Per discussion.
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.
Adds additional test for active walsenders and closes a race
condition for when we failover when a new walsender was connecting.
Reported and fixed bu Fujii Masao. Review by Heikki Linnakangas
walsender.h should depend on xlog.h, not vice versa. (Actually, the
inclusion was circular until a couple hours ago, which was even sillier;
but Bruce broke it in the expedient rather than logically correct
direction.) Because of that poor decision, plus blind application of
pgrminclude, we had a situation where half the system was depending on
xlog.h to include such unrelated stuff as array.h and guc.h. Clean up
the header inclusion, and manually revert a lot of what pgrminclude had
done so things build again.
This episode reinforces my feeling that pgrminclude should not be run
without adult supervision. Inclusion changes in header files in particular
need to be reviewed with great care. More generally, it'd be good if we
had a clearer notion of module layering to dictate which headers can sanely
include which others ... but that's a big task for another day.
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.
In pursuit of this (and with the expectation that WaitLatch will be needed
in more places), convert the latch field that was already added to PGPROC
for sync rep into a generic latch that is activated for all PGPROC-owning
processes, and change many of the standard backend signal handlers to set
that latch when a signal happens. This will allow WaitLatch callers to be
wakened properly by these signals.
In passing, fix a whole bunch of signal handlers that had been hacked to do
things that might change errno, without adding the necessary save/restore
logic for errno. Also make some minor fixes in unix_latch.c, and clean
up bizarre and unsafe scheme for disowning the process's latch. Much of
this has to be back-patched into 9.1.
Peter Geoghegan, with additional work by Tom
The original definition had the problem that timeouts exceeding about 2100
seconds couldn't be specified on 32-bit machines. Milliseconds seem like
sufficient resolution, and finer grain than that would be fantasy anyway
on many platforms.
Back-patch to 9.1 so that this aspect of the latch API won't change between
9.1 and later releases.
Peter Geoghegan
Instead of entering them on transaction startup, we materialize them
only when someone wants to wait, which will occur only during CREATE
INDEX CONCURRENTLY. In Hot Standby mode, the startup process must also
be able to probe for conflicting VXID locks, but the lock need never be
fully materialized, because the startup process does not use the normal
lock wait mechanism. Since most VXID locks never need to touch the
lock manager partition locks, this can significantly reduce blocking
contention on read-heavy workloads.
Patch by me. Review by Jeff Davis.
Standby servers can now have WALSender processes, which can work with
either WALReceiver or archive_commands to pass data. Fully updated
docs, including new conceptual terms of sending server, upstream and
downstream servers. WALSenders terminated when promote to master.
Fujii Masao, review, rework and doc rewrite by Simon Riggs
When an AccessShareLock, RowShareLock, or RowExclusiveLock is requested
on an unshared database relation, and we can verify that no conflicting
locks can possibly be present, record the lock in a per-backend queue,
stored within the PGPROC, rather than in the primary lock table. This
eliminates a great deal of contention on the lock manager LWLocks.
This patch also refactors the interface between GetLockStatusData() and
pg_lock_status() to be a bit more abstract, so that we don't rely so
heavily on the lock manager's internal representation details. The new
fast path lock structures don't have a LOCK or PROCLOCK structure to
return, so we mustn't depend on that for purposes of listing outstanding
locks.
Review by Jeff Davis.
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.
postmaster.log", or nohup.
There was a small issue with LINUX_OOM_ADJ and silent_mode, namely that with
silent_mode the postmaster process incorrectly used the OOM settings meant
for backend processes. We certainly could've fixed that directly, but since
silent_mode was redundant anyway, we might as well just remove it.
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.
This option turns off autovacuum, prevents non-super-user connections,
and enables oid setting hooks in the backend. The code continues to use
the old autoavacuum disable settings for servers with earlier catalog
versions.
This includes a catalog version bump to identify servers that support
the -b option.
Also avoid hardcoding the current default state by giving it the name
"on" and replace with a meaningful name that reflects its behaviour.
Coding only, no change in behaviour.
This means one less thing to configure when setting up synchronous
replication, and also avoids some ambiguity around what the behavior
should be when the settings of these variables conflict.
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me.
If a smart shutdown occurs just as a child is starting up, and the
child subsequently becomes a walsender, there is a race condition:
the postmaster might count the exstant backends, determine that there
is one normal backend, and wait for it to die off. Had the walsender
transition already occurred before the postmaster counted, it would
have proceeded with the shutdown.
To fix this, have each child that transforms into a walsender kick
the postmaster just after doing so, so that the state machine is
certain to advance.
Fujii Masao
This is no longer necessary, and might result in a situation where the
configuration file is reloaded (and everything seems OK) but a subsequent
restart of the database fails.
Per an observation from Fujii Masao.
This is advantageous because the BG writer is alive until much later in
the shutdown sequence than WAL writer; we want to make sure that it's
possible to shut off synchronous replication during a smart shutdown,
else it might not be possible to complete the shutdown at all.
Per very reasonable gripes from Fujii Masao and Simon Riggs.