In the previous coding, new backend processes would attempt to create their
self-pipe during the OwnLatch call in InitProcess. However, pipe creation
could fail if the kernel is short of resources; and the system does not
recover gracefully from a FATAL error right there, since we have armed the
dead-man switch for this process and not yet set up the on_shmem_exit
callback that would disarm it. The postmaster then forces an unnecessary
database-wide crash and restart, as reported by Sean Chittenden.
There are various ways we could rearrange the code to fix this, but the
simplest and sanest seems to be to split out creation of the self-pipe into
a new function InitializeLatchSupport, which must be called from a place
where failure is allowed. For most processes that gets called in
InitProcess or InitAuxiliaryProcess, but processes that don't call either
but still use latches need their own calls.
Back-patch to 9.1, which has only a part of the latch logic that 9.2 and
HEAD have, but nonetheless includes this bug.
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.
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
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.
archive_command) as soon as possible, namely just before issuing a new call
of archive_command, even when there is a backlog of files to be archived.
The original coding would only absorb new settings after clearing the backlog
and returning to the outer loop. Per discussion.
Back-patch to 8.3. The logic in prior versions is a bit different and it
doesn't seem worth taking any risks of breaking it.
finish archiving everything (when there's no error), and to eliminate various
hazards as best we can. This fixes a previous 8.3 patch that caused the
postmaster to kill and then restart the archiver during shutdown (!?).
The new behavior is that the archiver is allowed to run unmolested until
the bgwriter has exited; then it is sent SIGUSR2 to tell it to do a final
archiving cycle and quit. We only SIGQUIT the archiver if we want a panic
stop; this is important since SIGQUIT will also be sent to any active
archive_command. The postmaster also now doesn't SIGQUIT the stats collector
until the bgwriter is done, since the bgwriter can send stats messages in 8.3.
The postmaster will not exit until both the archiver and stats collector are
gone; this provides some defense (not too bulletproof) against conflicting
archiver or stats collector processes being started by a new postmaster
instance. We continue the prior practice that the archiver will check
for postmaster death immediately before issuing any archive_command; that
gives some additional protection against conflicting archivers.
Also, modify the archiver process to notice SIGTERM and refuse to issue any
more archive commands if it gets it. The postmaster doesn't ever send it
SIGTERM; we assume that any such signal came from init and is a notice of
impending whole-system shutdown. In this situation it seems imprudent to try
to start new archive commands --- if they aren't extremely quick they're
likely to get SIGKILL'd by init.
All per discussion.
- create a separate archive_mode GUC, on which archive_command is dependent
- %r option in recovery.conf sends last restartpoint to recovery command
- %r used in pg_standby, updated README
- minor other code cleanup in pg_standby
- doc on Warm Standby now mentions pg_standby and %r
- log_restartpoints recovery option emits LOG message at each restartpoint
- end of recovery now displays last transaction end time, as requested
by Warren Little; also shown at each restartpoint
- restart archiver if needed to carry away WAL files at shutdown
Simon Riggs
so that we will be able to create a cookie for all processes for CSVlogs.
It is set wherever MyProcPid is set. Take the opportunity to remove the now
unnecessary session-only restriction on the %s and %c escapes in log_line_prefix.
Windows), arrange for each postmaster child process to be its own process
group leader, and deliver signals SIGINT, SIGTERM, SIGQUIT to the whole
process group not only the direct child process. This provides saner behavior
for archive and recovery scripts; in particular, it's possible to shut down a
warm-standby recovery server using "pg_ctl stop -m immediate", since delivery
of SIGQUIT to the startup subprocess will result in killing the waiting
recovery_command. Also, this makes Query Cancel and statement_timeout apply
to scripts being run from backends via system(). (There is no support in the
core backend for that, but it's widely done using untrusted PLs.) Per gripe
from Stephen Harris and subsequent discussion.
an LWLock instead of a spinlock. This hardly matters on Unix machines
but should improve startup performance on Windows (or any port using
EXEC_BACKEND). Per previous discussion.
chdir into PGDATA and subsequently use relative paths instead of absolute
paths to access all files under PGDATA. This seems to give a small
performance improvement, and it should make the system more robust
against naive DBAs doing things like moving a database directory that
has a live postmaster in it. Per recent discussion.
includes error checking and an appropriate ereport(ERROR) message.
This gets rid of rather tedious and error-prone manipulation of errno,
as well as a Windows-specific bug workaround, at more than a dozen
call sites. After an idea in a recent patch by Heikki Linnakangas.
before we can invoke fork() -- flush stdio buffers, save and restore the
profiling timer on Linux with LINUX_PROFILE, and handle BeOS stuff. This
patch moves that code into a single function, fork_process(), instead of
duplicating it at the various callsites of fork().
This patch doesn't address the EXEC_BACKEND case; there is room for
further cleanup there.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
> seconds to 10 seconds. The original number was plucked from thin air
> some months ago, and I'd like to review that now based upon further
> thought, observation and experience.
>
> This change has little or no effect on performance, since the interval
> is there mainly to avoid repeated respawn attempts if archiver fails at
> startup. Archiver start-up time is very quick, so there is little danger
> of exceeding 10 seconds.
>
> On a busy system, if the archiver does die, then many files can build up
> in the 60 seconds before respawning. That xlog file backlog could take
> some time to clear. This then leaves a larger than normal window of data
> loss for a possibly long period.
>
> It's a minor change only, with no other effect on function.
Simon Riggs
Fujii Masao
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Heikki Linnakangas
Tom Lane
Magnus Hagander
Andrew Dunstan
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon