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.
This coding pattern creates a race condition, because if an interesting
interrupt happens after we've checked InterruptPending but before we reset
our latch, the latch-setting done by the signal handler would get lost,
and then we might block at WaitLatch in the next iteration without ever
noticing the interrupt condition. You can put the CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS
before WaitLatch or after ResetLatch, but not between them.
Aside from fixing the bugs, add some explanatory comments to latch.h
to perhaps forestall the next person from making the same mistake.
In HEAD, also replace gather_readnext's direct call of
HandleParallelMessages with CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS. It does not seem clean
or useful for this one caller to bypass ProcessInterrupts and go straight
to HandleParallelMessages; not least because that fails to consider the
InterruptPending flag, resulting in useless work both here
(if InterruptPending isn't set) and in the next CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS call
(if it is).
This thinko seems to have been introduced in the initial coding of
storage/ipc/shm_mq.c (commit ec9037df2), and then blindly copied into all
the subsequent parallel-query support logic. Back-patch relevant hunks
to 9.4 to extirpate the error everywhere.
Discussion: <1661.1469996911@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Commit ac1d794 ("Make idle backends exit if the postmaster dies.")
introduced a regression on, at least, large linux systems. Constantly
adding the same postmaster_alive_fds to the OSs internal datastructures
for implementing poll/select can cause significant contention; leading
to a performance regression of nearly 3x in one example.
This can be avoided by using e.g. linux' epoll, which avoids having to
add/remove file descriptors to the wait datastructures at a high rate.
Unfortunately the current latch interface makes it hard to allocate any
persistent per-backend resources.
Replace, with a backward compatibility layer, WaitLatchOrSocket with a
new WaitEventSet API. Users can allocate such a Set across multiple
calls, and add more than one file-descriptor to wait on. The latter has
been added because there's upcoming postgres features where that will be
helpful.
In addition to the previously existing poll(2), select(2),
WaitForMultipleObjects() implementations also provide an epoll_wait(2)
based implementation to address the aforementioned performance
problem. Epoll is only available on linux, but that is the most likely
OS for machines large enough (four sockets) to reproduce the problem.
To actually address the aforementioned regression, create and use a
long-lived WaitEventSet for FE/BE communication. There are additional
places that would benefit from a long-lived set, but that's a task for
another day.
Thanks to Amit Kapila, who helped make the windows code I blindly wrote
actually work.
Reported-By: Dmitry Vasilyev Discussion:
CAB-SwXZh44_2ybvS5Z67p_CDz=XFn4hNAD=CnMEF+QqkXwFrGg@mail.gmail.com20160114143931.GG10941@awork2.anarazel.de
Previously latches for windows and unix had been implemented in
different files. A later patch introduce an expanded wait
infrastructure, keeping the implementation separate would introduce too
much duplication.
This basically just moves the functions, without too much change. The
reason to keep this separate is that it allows blame to continue working
a little less badly; and to make review a tiny bit easier.
Discussion: 20160114143931.GG10941@awork2.anarazel.de
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
Since their introduction latches have required barriers in SetLatch
and ResetLatch - but when they were introduced there wasn't any
barrier abstraction. Instead latches were documented to rely on the
callsites to provide barrier semantics.
Now that the barrier support looks halfway complete, add the necessary
barriers to both latch implementations.
Also remove a now superflous lock acquisition from syncrep.c and a
superflous (and insufficient) barrier from freelist.c. There might be
other cases that can now be simplified, but those are the only ones
I've seen on a quick scan.
We might want to backpatch this at some later point, but right now the
barrier infrastructure in the backbranches isn't totally on par with
master.
Discussion: 20150112154026.GB2092@awork2.anarazel.de
If the sleep is interrupted by a signal, we must recompute the remaining
time to wait; otherwise, a steady stream of non-wait-terminating interrupts
could delay return from WaitLatch indefinitely. This has been shown to be
a problem for the autovacuum launcher, and there may well be other places
now or in the future with similar issues. So we'd better make the function
robust, even though this'll add at least one gettimeofday call per wait.
Back-patch to 9.2. We might eventually need to fix 9.1 as well, but the
code is quite different there, and the usage of WaitLatch in 9.1 is so
limited that it's not clearly important to do so.
Reported and diagnosed by Jeff Janes, though I rewrote his patch rather
heavily.
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.
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
Improve the documentation around weak-memory-ordering risks, and do a pass
of general editorialization on the comments in the latch code. Make the
Windows latch code more like the Unix latch code where feasible; in
particular provide the same Assert checks in both implementations.
Fix poorly-placed WaitLatch call in syncrep.c.
This patch resolves, for the moment, concerns around weak-memory-ordering
bugs in latch-related code: we have documented the restrictions and checked
that existing calls meet them. In 9.2 I hope that we will install suitable
memory barrier instructions in SetLatch/ResetLatch, so that their callers
don't need to be quite so careful.
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.
than replication_timeout (a new GUC) milliseconds. The TCP timeout is often
too long, you want the master to notice a dead connection much sooner.
People complained about that in 9.0 too, but with synchronous replication
it's even more important to notice dead connections promptly.
Fujii Masao and Heikki Linnakangas
dynamic pool of event handles, we can permanently assign one for each
shared latch. Thanks to that, we no longer need a separate shared memory
block for latches, and we don't need to know in advance how many shared
latches there is, so you no longer need to remember to update
NumSharedLatches when you introduce a new latch to the system.
wait until it is set. Latches can be used to reliably wait until a signal
arrives, which is hard otherwise because signals don't interrupt select()
on some platforms, and even when they do, there's race conditions.
On Unix, latches use the so called self-pipe trick under the covers to
implement the sleep until the latch is set, without race conditions. On
Windows, Windows events are used.
Use the new latch abstraction to sleep in walsender, so that as soon as
a transaction finishes, walsender is woken up to immediately send the WAL
to the standby. This reduces the latency between master and standby, which
is good.
Preliminary work by Fujii Masao. The latch implementation is by me, with
helpful comments from many people.
