Some background activity (like checkpoints, archive timeout, standby
snapshots) is not supposed to happen on an idle system. Unfortunately
so far it was not easy to determine when a system is idle, which
defeated some of the attempts to avoid redundant activity on an idle
system.
To make that easier, allow to make individual WAL insertions as not
being "important". By checking whether any important activity happened
since the last time an activity was performed, it now is easy to check
whether some action needs to be repeated.
Use the new facility for checkpoints, archive timeout and standby
snapshots.
The lack of a facility causes some issues in older releases, but in my
opinion the consequences (superflous checkpoints / archived segments)
aren't grave enough to warrant backpatching.
Author: Michael Paquier, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund, David Steele, Amit Kapila, Kyotaro HORIGUCHI
Bug: #13685
Discussion:
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20151016203031.3019.72930@wrigleys.postgresql.orghttps://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqQcPqxEM3S735Bd2RzApNqSNJVietAC=6kfkYv_45dKwA@mail.gmail.com
Backpatch: -
Condition variables provide a flexible way to sleep until a
cooperating process causes an arbitrary condition to become true. In
simple cases, this can be accomplished with a WaitLatch/ResetLatch
loop; the cooperating process can call SetLatch after performing work
that might cause the condition to be satisfied, and the waiting
process can recheck the condition each time. However, if the process
performing the work doesn't have an easy way to identify which
processes might be waiting, this doesn't work, because it can't
identify which latches to set. Condition variables solve that problem
by internally maintaining a list of waiters; a process that may have
caused some waiter's condition to be satisfied must "signal" or
"broadcast" on the condition variable.
Robert Haas and Thomas Munro
WaitLatch, WaitLatchOrSocket, and WaitEventSetWait now taken an
additional wait_event_info parameter; legal values are defined in
pgstat.h. This makes it possible to uniquely identify every point in
the core code where we are waiting for a latch; extensions can pass
WAIT_EXTENSION.
Because latches were the major wait primitive not previously covered
by this patch, it is now possible to see information in
pg_stat_activity on a large number of important wait events not
previously addressed, such as ClientRead, ClientWrite, and SyncRep.
Unfortunately, many of the wait events added by this patch will fail
to appear in pg_stat_activity because they're only used in background
processes which don't currently appear in pg_stat_activity. We should
fix this either by creating a separate view for such information, or
else by deciding to include them in pg_stat_activity after all.
Michael Paquier and Robert Haas, reviewed by Alexander Korotkov and
Thomas Munro.
I found that half a dozen (nearly 5%) of our AllocSetContextCreate calls
had typos in the context-sizing parameters. While none of these led to
especially significant problems, they did create minor inefficiencies,
and it's now clear that expecting people to copy-and-paste those calls
accurately is not a great idea. Let's reduce the risk of future errors
by introducing single macros that encapsulate the common use-cases.
Three such macros are enough to cover all but two special-purpose contexts;
those two calls can be left as-is, I think.
While this patch doesn't in itself improve matters for third-party
extensions, it doesn't break anything for them either, and they can
gradually adopt the simplified notation over time.
In passing, change TopMemoryContext to use the default allocation
parameters. Formerly it could only be extended 8K at a time. That was
probably reasonable when this code was written; but nowadays we create
many more contexts than we did then, so that it's not unusual to have a
couple hundred K in TopMemoryContext, even without considering various
dubious code that sticks other things there. There seems no good reason
not to let it use growing blocks like most other contexts.
Back-patch to 9.6, mostly because that's still close enough to HEAD that
it's easy to do so, and keeping the branches in sync can be expected to
avoid some future back-patching pain. The bugs fixed by these changes
don't seem to be significant enough to justify fixing them further back.
Discussion: <21072.1472321324@sss.pgh.pa.us>
If archive_timeout > 0 we should avoid logging XLOG_RUNNING_XACTS if idle.
Bug 13685 reported by Laurence Rowe, investigated in detail by Michael Paquier,
though this is not his proposed fix.
20151016203031.3019.72930@wrigleys.postgresql.org
Simple non-invasive patch to allow later backpatch to 9.4 and 9.5
Currently writes to the main data files of postgres all go through the
OS page cache. This means that some operating systems can end up
collecting a large number of dirty buffers in their respective page
caches. When these dirty buffers are flushed to storage rapidly, be it
because of fsync(), timeouts, or dirty ratios, latency for other reads
and writes can increase massively. This is the primary reason for
regular massive stalls observed in real world scenarios and artificial
benchmarks; on rotating disks stalls on the order of hundreds of seconds
have been observed.
On linux it is possible to control this by reducing the global dirty
limits significantly, reducing the above problem. But global
configuration is rather problematic because it'll affect other
applications; also PostgreSQL itself doesn't always generally want this
behavior, e.g. for temporary files it's undesirable.
Several operating systems allow some control over the kernel page
cache. Linux has sync_file_range(2), several posix systems have msync(2)
and posix_fadvise(2). sync_file_range(2) is preferable because it
requires no special setup, whereas msync() requires the to-be-flushed
range to be mmap'ed. For the purpose of flushing dirty data
posix_fadvise(2) is the worst alternative, as flushing dirty data is
just a side-effect of POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED, which also removes the pages
from the page cache. Thus the feature is enabled by default only on
linux, but can be enabled on all systems that have any of the above
APIs.
While desirable and likely possible this patch does not contain an
implementation for windows.
With the infrastructure added, writes made via checkpointer, bgwriter
and normal user backends can be flushed after a configurable number of
writes. Each of these sources of writes controlled by a separate GUC,
checkpointer_flush_after, bgwriter_flush_after and backend_flush_after
respectively; they're separate because the number of flushes that are
good are separate, and because the performance considerations of
controlled flushing for each of these are different.
A later patch will add checkpoint sorting - after that flushes from the
ckeckpoint will almost always be desirable. Bgwriter flushes are most of
the time going to be random, which are slow on lots of storage hardware.
Flushing in backends works well if the storage and bgwriter can keep up,
but if not it can have negative consequences. This patch is likely to
have negative performance consequences without checkpoint sorting, but
unfortunately so has sorting without flush control.
Discussion: alpine.DEB.2.10.1506011320000.28433@sto
Author: Fabien Coelho and Andres Freund
When a process is waiting for a heavyweight lock, we will now indicate
the type of heavyweight lock for which it is waiting. Also, you can
now see when a process is waiting for a lightweight lock - in which
case we will indicate the individual lock name or the tranche, as
appropriate - or for a buffer pin.
Amit Kapila, Ildus Kurbangaliev, reviewed by me. Lots of helpful
discussion and suggestions by many others, including Alexander
Korotkov, Vladimir Borodin, and many others.
To do so, move InitializeLatchSupport() into the new common process
initialization functions, and add a new global variable MyLatch.
MyLatch is usable as soon InitPostmasterChild() has been called
(i.e. very early during startup). Initially it points to a process
local latch that exists in all processes. InitProcess/InitAuxiliaryProcess
then replaces that local latch with PGPROC->procLatch. During shutdown
the reverse happens.
This is primarily advantageous for two reasons: For one it simplifies
dealing with the shared process latch, especially in signal handlers,
because instead of having to check for MyProc, MyLatch can be used
unconditionally. For another, a later patch that makes FEs/BE
communication use latches, now can rely on the existence of a latch,
even before having gone through InitProcess.
Discussion: 20140927191243.GD5423@alap3.anarazel.de
Move common code, that was duplicated in every postmaster child/every
standalone process, into two functions in miscinit.c. Not only does
that already result in a fair amount of net code reduction but it also
makes it much easier to remove more duplication in the future. The
prime motivation wasn't code deduplication though, but easier addition
of new common code.
StrategyGetBuffer() has proven to be a bottleneck in a number of
buffer acquisition heavy workloads. To some degree this has already
been alleviated by 5d7962c6, but it still can be quite a heavy
bottleneck. The problem is that in unfortunate usage patterns a
single StrategyGetBuffer() call will have to look at a large number of
buffers - in turn making it likely that the process will be put to
sleep while still holding the spinlock.
Replace most of the usage of the buffer_strategy_lock spinlock for the
clock sweep by a atomic nextVictimBuffer variable. That variable,
modulo NBuffers, is the current hand of the clock sweep. The buffer
clock-sweep then only needs to acquire the spinlock after a
wraparound. And even then only in the process that did the wrapping
around. That alleviates nearly all the contention on the relevant
spinlock, although significant contention on the cacheline can still
exist.
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas and Amit Kapila
Discussion: 20141010160020.GG6670@alap3.anarazel.de,
20141027133218.GA2639@awork2.anarazel.de
Previously, we did this just once per checkpoint, but that could make
Hot Standby take a long time to initialize. To avoid busying an
otherwise-idle system, we don't do this if no WAL has been written
since we did it last.
Andres Freund
We used to set it to the current recovery target timeline, but the recovery
target timeline can change during recovery, leaving ThisTimeLineID at an
old value. That seems worse than always leaving it at zero to begin with.
AFAICS there was no good reason to set it in the first place. ThisTimeLineID
is not needed in checkpointer or bgwriter process, until it's time to write
the end-of-recovery checkpoint, and at that point ThisTimeLineID is updated
anyway.
If an SMgrRelation is not "owned" by a relcache entry, don't allow it to
live past transaction end. This design allows the same SMgrRelation to be
used for blind writes of multiple blocks during a transaction, but ensures
that we don't hold onto such an SMgrRelation indefinitely. Because an
SMgrRelation typically corresponds to open file descriptors at the fd.c
level, leaving it open when there's no corresponding relcache entry can
mean that we prevent the kernel from reclaiming deleted disk space.
(While CacheInvalidateSmgr messages usually fix that, there are cases
where they're not issued, such as DROP DATABASE. We might want to add
some more sinval messaging for that, but I'd be inclined to keep this
type of logic anyway, since allowing VFDs to accumulate indefinitely
for blind-written relations doesn't seem like a good idea.)
This code replaces a previous attempt towards the same goal that proved
to be unreliable. Back-patch to 9.1 where the previous patch was added.
mdinit() was misusing IsBootstrapProcessingMode() to decide whether to
create an fsync pending-operations table in the current process. This led
to creating a table not only in the startup and checkpointer processes as
intended, but also in the bgwriter process, not to mention other auxiliary
processes such as walwriter and walreceiver. Creation of the table in the
bgwriter is fatal, because it absorbs fsync requests that should have gone
to the checkpointer; instead they just sit in bgwriter local memory and are
never acted on. So writes performed by the bgwriter were not being fsync'd
which could result in data loss after an OS crash. I think there is no
live bug with respect to walwriter and walreceiver because those never
perform any writes of shared buffers; but the potential is there for
future breakage in those processes too.
To fix, make AuxiliaryProcessMain() export the current process's
AuxProcType as a global variable, and then make mdinit() test directly for
the types of aux process that should have a pendingOpsTable. Having done
that, we might as well also get rid of the random bool flags such as
am_walreceiver that some of the aux processes had grown. (Note that we
could not have fixed the bug by examining those variables in mdinit(),
because it's called from BaseInit() which is run by AuxiliaryProcessMain()
before entering any of the process-type-specific code.)
Back-patch to 9.2, where the problem was introduced by the split-up of
bgwriter and checkpointer processes. The bogus pendingOpsTable exists
in walwriter and walreceiver processes in earlier branches, but absent
any evidence that it causes actual problems there, I'll leave the older
branches alone.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
When we need to insert a new entry and the queue is full, compact the
entire queue in the hopes of making room for the new entry. Doing this
on every insertion might worsen contention on BgWriterCommLock, but
when the queue it's full, it's far better than allowing the backend to
perform its own fsync, per testing by Greg Smith as reported in
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-01/msg02665.php
Original idea from Greg Smith. Patch by me. Review by Chris Browne
and Greg Smith
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.
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.
rather than returning NULL for some-but-not-all failures as they used to.
Remove now-redundant tests for NULL from call sites.
We had to do something about this because many call sites were failing to
check for NULL; and changing it like this seems a lot more useful and
mistake-proof than adding checks to the call sites without them.
This includes two new kinds of postmaster processes, walsenders and
walreceiver. Walreceiver is responsible for connecting to the primary server
and streaming WAL to disk, while walsender runs in the primary server and
streams WAL from disk to the client.
Documentation still needs work, but the basics are there. We will probably
pull the replication section to a new chapter later on, as well as the
sections describing file-based replication. But let's do that as a separate
patch, so that it's easier to see what has been added/changed. This patch
also adds a new section to the chapter about FE/BE protocol, documenting the
protocol used by walsender/walreceivxer.
Bump catalog version because of two new functions,
pg_last_xlog_receive_location() and pg_last_xlog_replay_location(), for
monitoring the progress of replication.
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me
Heikki Linnakangas
Bruce Momjian
Andres Freund
Robert Haas
Tom Lane
Simon Riggs
Magnus Hagander
Alvaro Herrera
Peter Eisentraut