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.
It originally worked this way, but was changed by commit
a8a8a3e096, since which time it's been impossible
for walreceiver to ever send a reply with write_location and flush_location
set to different values.
If a standby is broadcasting reply messages and we have named
one or more standbys in synchronous_standby_names then allow
users who set synchronous_replication to wait for commit, which
then provides strict data integrity guarantees. Design avoids
sending and receiving transaction state information so minimises
bookkeeping overheads. We synchronize with the highest priority
standby that is connected and ready to synchronize. Other standbys
can be defined to takeover in case of standby failure.
This version has very strict behaviour; more relaxed options
may be added at a later date.
Simon Riggs and Fujii Masao, with reviews by Yeb Havinga, Jaime
Casanova, Heikki Linnakangas and Robert Haas, plus the assistance
of many other design reviewers.
it a lot more useful for determining which standby is most up-to-date,
for example. There was long discussions on whether overwriting existing
existing WAL makes sense to begin with, and whether we should do some more
extensive variable renaming, but this change nevertheless seems quite
uncontroversial.
Fujii Masao, reviewed by Jeff Janes, Robert Haas, Stephen Frost.
Without this patch, when wal_receiver_status_interval=0, indicating that no
status messages should be sent, Hot Standby feedback messages are instead sent
extremely frequently.
Fujii Masao, with documentation changes by me.
Standby optionally sends back information about oldestXmin of queries
which is then checked and applied to the WALSender's proc->xmin.
GetOldestXmin() is modified slightly to agree with GetSnapshotData(),
so that all backends on primary include WALSender within their snapshots.
Note this does nothing to change the snapshot xmin on either master or
standby. Feedback piggybacks on the standby reply message.
vacuum_defer_cleanup_age is no longer used on standby, though parameter
still exists on primary, since some use cases still exist.
Simon Riggs, review comments from Fujii Masao, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
the standby has written, flushed, and applied the WAL. At the moment, this
is for informational purposes only, the values are only shown in
pg_stat_replication system view, but in the future they will also be needed
for synchronous replication.
Extracted from Simon riggs' synchronous replication patch by Robert Haas, with
some tweaking by me.
Otherwise WAL recovery will replay the un-flushed WAL after walreceiver has
exited, which can lead to a non-recoverable standby if the system crashes hard
at that point.
new WAL arrives via streaming replication. This reduces the latency, and
also allows us to use a longer polling interval, which is good for energy
efficiency.
We still need to poll to check for the appearance of a trigger file, but
the interval is now 5 seconds (instead of 100ms), like when waiting for
a new WAL segment to appear in WAL archive.
max_standby_streaming_delay, and revise the implementation to avoid assuming
that timestamps found in WAL records can meaningfully be compared to clock
time on the standby server. Instead, the delay limits are compared to the
elapsed time since we last obtained a new WAL segment from archive or since
we were last "caught up" to WAL data arriving via streaming replication.
This avoids problems with clock skew between primary and standby, as well
as other corner cases that the original coding would misbehave in, such
as the primary server having significant idle time between transactions.
Per my complaint some time ago and considerable ensuing discussion.
Do some desultory editing on the hot standby documentation, too.
checkpoint_timeout to trigger restartpoints. We used to deliberately only
do time-based restartpoints, because if checkpoint_segments is small we
would spend time doing restartpoints more often than really necessary.
But now that restartpoints are done in bgwriter, they're not as
disruptive as they used to be. Secondly, because streaming replication
stores the streamed WAL files in pg_xlog, we want to clean it up more
often to avoid running out of disk space when checkpoint_timeout is large
and checkpoint_segments small.
Patch by Fujii Masao, with some minor changes by me.
and current server clock time to SR data messages. These are not currently
used on the slave side but seem likely to be useful in future, and it'd be
better not to change the SR protocol after release. Per discussion.
Also do some minor code review and cleanup on walsender.c, and improve the
protocol documentation.
libpq to send queries, making the waiting for responses interruptible on
platforms where PQexec() can't normally be interrupted by signals, such
as win32.
Fujii Masao and Magnus Hagander
enabled. Bypassing the kernel cache is counter-productive in that case,
because the archiver/walsender process will read from the WAL file
soon after it's written, and if it's not cached the read will cause
a physical read, eating I/O bandwidth available on the WAL drive.
Also, walreceiver process does unaligned writes, so disable O_DIRECT
in walreceiver process for that reason too.
restore_command, if the connection to the primary server is lost. This
ensures that the standby can recover automatically, if the connection is
lost for a long time and standby falls behind so much that the required
WAL segments have been archived and deleted in the master.
This also makes standby_mode useful without streaming replication; the
server will keep retrying restore_command every few seconds until the
trigger file is found. That's the same basic functionality pg_standby
offers, but without the bells and whistles.
To implement that, refactor the ReadRecord/FetchRecord functions. The
FetchRecord() function introduced in the original streaming replication
patch is removed, and all the retry logic is now in a new function called
XLogReadPage(). XLogReadPage() is now responsible for executing
restore_command, launching walreceiver, and waiting for new WAL to arrive
from primary, as required.
This also changes the life cycle of walreceiver. When launched, it now only
tries to connect to the master once, and exits if the connection fails, or
is lost during streaming for any reason. The startup process detects the
death, and re-launches walreceiver if necessary.
walreceiver as whole into a dynamically loaded module, split the
libpq-specific parts of it into dynamically loaded module and keep the rest
in the main backend binary.
Although Tom fixed the Windows compilation problems with the old walreceiver
module already, this is a cleaner division of labour and makes the code
more readable. There's also the prospect of adding new transport methods
as pluggable modules in the future, which this patch makes easier, though for
now the API between libpqwalreceiver and walreceiver process should be
considered private.
The libpq-specific module is now in src/backend/replication/libpqwalreceiver,
and the part linked with postgres binary is in
src/backend/replication/walreceiver.c.