This reverts commit 18fb9d8d21. Per
discussion, it does not seem like a good idea to allow committed changes to
go un-checkpointed indefinitely, as could happen in a low-traffic server;
that makes us entirely reliant on the WAL stream with no redundancy that
might aid data recovery in case of disk failure.
This re-introduces the original problem of hot-standby setups generating a
small continuing stream of WAL traffic even when idle, but there are other
ways to address that without compromising crash recovery, so we'll revisit
that issue in a future release cycle.
WALSender now woken up after each background flush by WALwriter, avoiding
multi-second replication delay for an all-async commit workload.
Replication delay reduced from 7s with default settings to 200ms and often
much less, allowing significantly reduced data loss at failover.
Andres Freund and Simon Riggs
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.
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.
Initialise ckptXidEpoch from starting checkpoint and maintain the correct
value as we roll forwards. This allows GetNextXidAndEpoch() to return the
correct epoch when executed during recovery. Backpatch to 9.0 when the
problem is first observable by a user.
Bug report from Daniel Farina
This simplifies the code a little bit. The new rule is that to update
XLogCtl->LogwrtResult, you must hold both WALWriteLock and info_lck, whereas
before we had two copies, one that was protected by WALWriteLock and another
protected by info_lck. The code that updates them was already holding both
locks, so merging the two is trivial.
The third copy, XLogCtl->Insert.LogwrtResult, was not totally redundant, it
was used in AdvanceXLInsertBuffer to update the backend-local copy, before
acquiring the info_lck to read the up-to-date value. But the value of that
seems dubious; at best it's saving one spinlock acquisition per completed
WAL page, which is not significant compared to all the other work involved.
And in practice, it's probably not saving even that much.
It's harmless to do full page writes even when not strictly necessary, so
when turning full_page_writes on, we can set the global flag first, and then
call XLogInsert. Likewise, when turning it off, we can write the WAL record
first, and then clear the flag. This way XLogInsert doesn't need any special
handling of the XLOG_FPW_CHANGE record type. XLogInsert is complicated
enough already, so anything we can keep away from there is a good thing.
Actually I don't think the atomicity of the shared memory flag matters,
anyway, because we only write the XLOG_FPW_CHANGE at the end of recovery,
when there are no concurrent WAL insertions going on. But might as well make
it safe, in case we allow changing full_page_writes on the fly in the
future.
Originally, most of this code assumed that no Postgres backends could be
running concurrently with it, and so no locking could be needed. That
assumption fails in Hot Standby. While it's still true that Hot Standby
backends should never change values like nextXid, they can examine them,
and consistency is important in some cases such as when computing a
snapshot. Therefore, prudence requires that WAL replay code obtain the
relevant locks when modifying such variables, even though it can examine
them without taking a lock. We were following that coding rule in some
places but not all. This commit applies the coding rule uniformly to all
updates of ShmemVariableCache and MultiXactState fields; a search of the
replay routines did not find any other cases that seemed to be at risk.
In addition, this commit fixes a longstanding thinko in replay of NEXTOID
and checkpoint records: we tried to advance nextOid only if it was behind
the value in the WAL record, but the comparison would draw the wrong
conclusion if OID wraparound had occurred since the previous value.
Better to just unconditionally assign the new value, since OID assignment
shouldn't be happening during replay anyway.
The additional locking seems to be more in the nature of future-proofing
than fixing any live bug, so I am not going to back-patch it. The NEXTOID
fix will be back-patched separately.
RestoreBkpBlocks was in the habit of zeroing and refilling the target
buffer; which was perfectly safe when the code was written, but is unsafe
during Hot Standby operation. The reason is that we have coding rules
that allow backends to continue accessing a tuple in a heap relation while
holding only a pin on its buffer. Such a backend could see transiently
zeroed data, if WAL replay had occasion to change other data on the page.
This has been shown to be the cause of bug #6425 from Duncan Rance (who
deserves kudos for developing a sufficiently-reproducible test case) as
well as Bridget Frey's re-report of bug #6200. It most likely explains the
original report as well, though we don't yet have confirmation of that.
To fix, change the code so that only bytes that are supposed to change will
change, even transiently. This actually saves cycles in RestoreBkpBlocks,
since it's not writing the same bytes twice.
Also fix seq_redo, which has the same disease, though it has to work a bit
harder to meet the requirement.
So far as I can tell, no other WAL replay routines have this type of bug.
In particular, the index-related replay routines, which would certainly be
broken if they had to meet the same standard, are not at risk because we
do not have coding rules that allow access to an index page when not
holding a buffer lock on it.
Back-patch to 9.0 where Hot Standby was added.
When a backend needs to flush the WAL, and someone else is already flushing
the WAL, wait until it releases the WALInsertLock and check if we still need
to do the flush or if the other backend already did the work for us, before
acquiring WALInsertLock. This helps group commit, because when the WAL flush
finishes, all the backends that were waiting for it can be woken up in one
go, and the can all concurrently observe that they're done, rather than
waking them up one by one in a cascading fashion.
This is based on a new LWLock function, LWLockWaitUntilFree(), which has
peculiar semantics. If the lock is immediately free, it grabs the lock and
returns true. If it's not free, it waits until it is released, but then
returns false without grabbing the lock. This is used in XLogFlush(), so
that when the lock is acquired, the backend flushes the WAL, but if it's
not, the backend first checks the current flush location before retrying.
Original patch and benchmarking by Peter Geoghegan and Simon Riggs, although
this patch as committed ended up being very different from that.
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
Previously we used ReadRecPtr rather than EndRecPtr, which was
not a serious error but caused pg_stat_replication to report
incorrect replay_location until at least one WAL record is replayed.
Fujii Masao
constructed before acquiring WALInsertLock, which slightly reduces the time
the lock is held. Although I could not measure any benefit in benchmarks,
the code is more readable this way.
Removing this bit from xl_info allows us to restore the old limit of four
(not three) separate pages touched by a WAL record, which is needed for the
upcoming SP-GiST feature, and will likely be useful elsewhere in future.
When we implemented XLR_BKP_REMOVABLE in 2007, we had to do it like that
because no special WAL-visible action was taken when starting a backup.
However, now we force a segment switch when starting a backup, so a
compressing WAL archiver (such as pglesslog) that uses the state shown in
the current page header will not be fooled as to removability of backup
blocks. The only downside is that the archiver will not return to
compressing mode for up to one WAL page after the backup is over, which is
a small price to pay for getting back the extra xl_info bit. In any case
the archiver could look for XLOG_BACKUP_END records if it thought it was
worth the trouble to do so.
Bump XLOG_PAGE_MAGIC since this is effectively a change in WAL format.
we don't reach consistency before replaying all of the WAL. Rename the
variable to reachedConsistency, to make its intention clearer.
In master, that was an active bug because of the recent patch to
immediately PANIC if a reference to a missing page is found in WAL after
reaching consistency, as Tom Lane's test case demonstrated. In 9.1 and 9.0,
the only consequence was a misleading "consistent recovery state reached at
%X/%X" message in the log at the beginning of crash recovery (the database
is not consistent at that point yet). In 8.4, the log message was not
printed in crash recovery, even though there was a similar
reachedMinRecoveryPoint local variable that was also set early. So,
backpatch to 9.1 and 9.0.
invalid-page hash table, PANIC immediately. Immediate PANIC is much better
than waiting for end-of-recovery, which is what we did before, because the
end-of-recovery might not come until months later if this is a standby
server.
Also refrain from creating a restartpoint if there are invalid-page entries
in the hash table. Restarting recovery from such a restartpoint would not
see the invalid references, and wouldn't be able to cross-check them when
consistency is reached. That wouldn't matter when things are going smoothly,
but the more sanity checks you have the better.
Fujii Masao
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.
Previously, we skipped a checkpoint if no WAL had been written since
last checkpoint, though this does not appear in user documentation.
As of now, we skip a checkpoint until we have written at least one
enough WAL to switch the next WAL file. This greatly reduces the
level of activity and number of WAL messages generated by a very
low activity server. This is safe because the purpose of a checkpoint
is to act as a starting place for a recovery, in case of crash.
This patch maintains minimal WAL volume for replay in case of crash,
thus maintaining very low crash recovery time.
There was a timing window between when oldestActiveXid was derived
and when it should have been derived that only shows itself under
heavy load. Move code around to ensure correct timing of derivation.
No change to StartupSUBTRANS() code, which is where this failed.
Bug report by Chris Redekop
A transaction can export a snapshot with pg_export_snapshot(), and then
others can import it with SET TRANSACTION SNAPSHOT. The data does not
leave the server so there are not security issues. A snapshot can only
be imported while the exporting transaction is still running, and there
are some other restrictions.
I'm not totally convinced that we've covered all the bases for SSI (true
serializable) mode, but it works fine for lesser isolation modes.
Joachim Wieland, reviewed by Marko Tiikkaja, and rather heavily modified
by Tom Lane
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 patch has two distinct purposes: to report multiple problems in
postgresql.conf rather than always bailing out after the first one,
and to change the policy for whether changes are applied when there are
unrelated errors in postgresql.conf.
Formerly the policy was to apply no changes if any errors could be
detected, but that had a significant consistency problem, because in some
cases specific values might be seen as valid by some processes but invalid
by others. This meant that the latter processes would fail to adopt
changes in other parameters even though the former processes had done so.
The new policy is that during SIGHUP, the file is rejected as a whole
if there are any errors in the "name = value" syntax, or if any lines
attempt to set nonexistent built-in parameters, or if any lines attempt
to set custom parameters whose prefix is not listed in (the new value of)
custom_variable_classes. These tests should always give the same results
in all processes, and provide what seems a reasonably robust defense
against loading values from badly corrupted config files. If these tests
pass, all processes will apply all settings that they individually see as
good, ignoring (but logging) any they don't.
In addition, the postmaster does not abandon reading a configuration file
after the first syntax error, but continues to read the file and report
syntax errors (up to a maximum of 100 syntax errors per file).
The postmaster will still refuse to start up if the configuration file
contains any errors at startup time, but these changes allow multiple
errors to be detected and reported before quitting.
Alexey Klyukin, reviewed by Andy Colson and av (Alexander ?)
with some additional hacking by Tom Lane
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.
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
streamed backup, throw an error and refuse to start up. The restore has not
finished correctly in that case and the data directory is possibly corrupt.
We already errored out in case of archive recovery, but could not during
crash recovery because we couldn't distinguish between the case that
pg_start_backup() was called and the database then crashed (must not error,
data is OK), and the case that we're restoring from a backup and not all
the needed WAL was replayed (data can be corrupt).
To distinguish those cases, add a line to backup_label to indicate
whether the backup was taken with pg_start/stop_backup(), or by streaming
(ie. pg_basebackup).
This requires re-initdb, because of a new field added to the control file.
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
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
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Simon Riggs
Robert Haas
Peter Eisentraut
Heikki Linnakangas
Alvaro Herrera