All Unix-oid platforms that we currently support should have waitpid(),
since it's in V2 of the Single Unix Spec. Our git history shows that
the wait3 code was added to support NextStep, which we officially dropped
support for as of 9.2. So get rid of the configure test, and simplify the
macro spaghetti in reaper(). Per suggestion from Fujii Masao.
There was a wild mix of calling conventions: Some were declared to
return void and didn't return, some returned an int exit code, some
claimed to return an exit code, which the callers checked, but
actually never returned, and so on.
Now all of these functions are declared to return void and decorated
with attribute noreturn and don't return. That's easiest, and most
code already worked that way.
This simplifies code that needs to do arithmetic on XLogRecPtrs.
To avoid changing on-disk format of data pages, the LSN on data pages is
still stored in the old format. That should keep pg_upgrade happy. However,
we have XLogRecPtrs embedded in the control file, and in the structs that
are sent over the replication protocol, so this changes breaks compatibility
of pg_basebackup and server. I didn't do anything about this in this patch,
per discussion on -hackers, the right thing to do would to be to change the
replication protocol to be architecture-independent, so that you could use
a newer version of pg_receivexlog, for example, against an older server
version.
The comments claimed that wasting the last segment made it easier to do
calculations with XLogRecPtrs, because you don't have problems representing
last-byte-position-plus-1 that way. In my experience, however, it only made
things more complicated, because the there was two ways to represent the
boundary at the beginning of a logical log file: logid = n+1 and xrecoff = 0,
or as xlogid = n and xrecoff = 4GB - XLOG_SEG_SIZE. Some functions were
picky about which representation was used.
Also, use a 64-bit segment number instead of the log/seg combination, to
point to a certain WAL segment. We assume that all platforms have a working
64-bit integer type nowadays.
This is an incompatible change in WAL format, so bumping WAL version number.
Formerly, if the system clock went backwards, the stats collector would
fail to update the stats file any more until the clock reading again
exceeds whatever timestamp was last written into the stats file. Such
glitches in the clock's behavior are not terribly unlikely on machines
not using NTP. Such a scenario has been observed to cause regression test
failures in the buildfarm, and it could have bad effects on the behavior
of autovacuum, so it seems prudent to install some defenses.
We could directly detect the clock going backwards by adding
GetCurrentTimestamp calls in the stats collector's main loop, but that
would hurt performance on platforms where GetCurrentTimestamp is expensive.
To minimize the performance hit in normal cases, adopt a more complicated
scheme wherein backends check for clock skew when reading the stats file,
and if they see it, signal the stats collector by sending an extra stats
inquiry message. The stats collector does an extra GetCurrentTimestamp
only when it receives an inquiry with an apparently out-of-order
timestamp.
To avoid unnecessary GetCurrentTimestamp calls, expand the inquiry messages
to carry the backend's current clock reading as well as its stats cutoff
time. The latter, being intentionally slightly in-the-past, would trigger
more clock rechecks than we need if it were used for this purpose.
We might want to backpatch this change at some point, but let's let it
shake out in the buildfarm for awhile first.
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.
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Heikki Linnakangas
Bruce Momjian
Simon Riggs
Robert Haas
Andrew Dunstan
Magnus Hagander