Commit Graph

456 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Bruce Momjian 03af60c010 Fix typo. 2012-08-22 12:05:25 -04:00
Bruce Momjian 7dff5b8edd Document that pg_reload_conf() is also an easy way to reload the
configuration file.
2012-08-22 12:01:27 -04:00
Tom Lane c9b0cbe98b Support having multiple Unix-domain sockets per postmaster.
Replace unix_socket_directory with unix_socket_directories, which is a list
of socket directories, and adjust postmaster's code to allow zero or more
Unix-domain sockets to be created.

This is mostly a straightforward change, but since the Unix sockets ought
to be created after the TCP/IP sockets for safety reasons (better chance
of detecting a port number conflict), AddToDataDirLockFile needs to be
fixed to support out-of-order updates of data directory lockfile lines.
That's a change that had been foreseen to be necessary someday anyway.

Honza Horak, reviewed and revised by Tom Lane
2012-08-10 17:27:15 -04:00
Magnus Hagander b3055ab4fb Fix upper limit of superuser_reserved_connections, add limit for wal_senders
Should be limited to the maximum number of connections excluding
autovacuum workers, not including.

Add similar check for max_wal_senders, which should never be higher than
max_connections.
2012-08-10 14:50:45 +02:00
Bruce Momjian 9fb5952cdf Document that trying to exceed temp_file_limit causes a query cancel.
Backpatch to 9.2.
2012-08-03 15:15:27 -04:00
Robert Haas 248b5fce06 More doc cleanups for recent shared memory changes.
Josh Kupershmidt
2012-07-04 15:57:48 -04:00
Robert Haas f11e8be3e8 Make commit_delay much smarter.
Instead of letting every backend participating in a group commit wait
independently, have the first one that becomes ready to flush WAL wait
for the configured delay, and let all the others wait just long enough
for that first process to complete its flush.  This greatly increases
the chances of being able to configure a commit_delay setting that
actually improves performance.

As a side consequence of this change, commit_delay now affects all WAL
flushes, rather than just commits.  There was some discussion on
pgsql-hackers about whether to rename the GUC to, say, wal_flush_delay,
but in the absence of consensus I am leaving it alone for now.

Peter Geoghegan, with some changes, mostly to the documentation, by me.
2012-07-02 10:26:31 -04:00
Tom Lane 817ec1bc82 Improve discussion of setting server parameters.
Rewrite description of "include_if_exists" for clarity.  Add subsection
headings to make the structure of the page a little clearer.  A couple
other minor improvements too.

Josh Kupershmidt and Tom Lane
2012-05-10 23:01:28 -04:00
Peter Eisentraut 586d356bc5 Properly capitalize the TimeZone parameter
For better or worse, it is implemented in mixed case, so document it
as such, at least in the main listing, like DateStyle.

Josh Kupershmidt
2012-05-10 20:59:09 +03:00
Tom Lane 309c64745e Rename track_iotiming GUC to track_io_timing.
This spelling seems significantly more readable to me.
2012-04-29 16:23:54 -04:00
Robert Haas 37e666b8b5 Doc clarification for synchronous_commit.
Fujii Masao
2012-04-18 10:11:03 -04:00
Robert Haas ea6a2d8d47 Rename synchronous_commit='write' to 'remote_write'.
Fujii Masao, per discussion on pgsql-hackers
2012-04-14 10:53:22 -04:00
Tom Lane 880bfc3287 Silently ignore any nonexistent schemas that are listed in search_path.
Previously we attempted to throw an error or at least warning for missing
schemas, but this was done inconsistently because of implementation
restrictions (in many cases, GUC settings are applied outside transactions
so that we can't do system catalog lookups).  Furthermore, there were
exceptions to the rule even in the beginning, and we'd been poking more
and more holes in it as time went on, because it turns out that there are
lots of use-cases for having some irrelevant items in a common search_path
value.  It seems better to just adopt a philosophy similar to what's always
been done with Unix PATH settings, wherein nonexistent or unreadable
directories are silently ignored.

This commit also fixes the documentation to point out that schemas for
which the user lacks USAGE privilege are silently ignored.  That's always
been true but was previously not documented.

This is mostly in response to Robert Haas' complaint that 9.1 started to
throw errors or warnings for missing schemas in cases where prior releases
had not.  We won't adopt such a significant behavioral change in a back
branch, so something different will be needed in 9.1.
2012-04-11 12:02:50 -04:00
Tom Lane c94b43ce39 Adjust various references to GEQO being non-deterministic.
It's still non-deterministic in some sense ... but given fixed settings
and identical planning problems, it will now always choose the same plan,
so we probably shouldn't tar it with that brush.  Per bug #6565 from
Guillaume Cottenceau.  Back-patch to 9.0 where the behavior was fixed.
2012-04-09 20:49:01 -04:00
Robert Haas 644828908f Expose track_iotiming data via the statistics collector.
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.
2012-04-05 11:40:24 -04:00
Robert Haas cee523867d pg_test_timing utility, to measure clock monotonicity and timing cost.
Ants Aasma, Greg Smith
2012-03-27 16:14:00 -04:00
Robert Haas 40b9b95769 New GUC, track_iotiming, to track I/O timings.
Currently, the only way to see the numbers this gathers is via
EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS), but the plan is to add visibility through
the stats collector and pg_stat_statements in subsequent patches.

Ants Aasma, reviewed by Greg Smith, with some further changes by me.
2012-03-27 14:55:02 -04:00
Tom Lane 3f47e145f1 Improve documentation around logging_collector and use of stderr.
In backup.sgml, point out that you need to be using the logging collector
if you want to log messages from a failing archive_command script.  (This
is an oversimplification, in that it will work without the collector as
long as you're not sending postmaster stderr to /dev/null; but it seems
like a good idea to encourage use of the collector to avoid problems
with multiple processes concurrently scribbling on one file.)

In config.sgml, do some wordsmithing of logging_collector discussion.

Per bug #6518 from Janning Vygen
2012-03-05 14:09:33 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut a445cb92ef Add parameters for controlling locations of server-side SSL files
This allows changing the location of the files that were previously
hard-coded to server.crt, server.key, root.crt, root.crl.

server.crt and server.key continue to be the default settings and are
thus required to be present by default if SSL is enabled.  But the
settings for the server-side CA and CRL are now empty by default, and
if they are set, the files are required to be present.  This replaces
the previous behavior of ignoring the functionality if the files were
not found.
2012-02-22 23:40:46 +02:00
Bruce Momjian c1d9df4fa2 Document random page cost is only 4x seqeuntial, and not 40x. 2012-02-14 16:54:54 -05:00
Heikki Linnakangas 2e92b5872f Mention in the docs that bgwriter now sleeps longer when it has no work to do. 2012-01-27 09:17:37 +02:00
Simon Riggs 443b4821f1 Add new replication mode synchronous_commit = 'write'.
Replication occurs only to memory on standby, not to disk,
so provides additional performance if user wishes to
reduce durability level slightly. Adds concept of multiple
independent sync rep queues.

Fujii Masao and Simon Riggs
2012-01-24 20:22:37 +00:00
Magnus Hagander a65023e7de Further doc cleanups from the pg_stat_activity changes
Fujii Masao
2012-01-20 12:23:26 +01:00
Robert Haas c8397bd6d9 Clarify that bgwriter no longer handles checkpoints.
Text by Peter Geoghegan.
2012-01-19 21:53:46 -05:00
Andrew Dunstan 6d09b2105f include_if_exists facility for config file.
This works the same as include, except that an error is not thrown
if the file is missing. Instead the fact that it's missing is
logged.

Greg Smith, reviewed by Euler Taveira de Oliveira.
2011-12-15 19:40:58 -05:00
Robert Haas 788cb1c2e8 Correct documentation for trace_userlocks. 2011-11-10 18:00:34 -05:00
Robert Haas 71b2b657c0 Revert removal of trace_userlocks, because userlocks aren't gone.
This reverts commit 0180bd6180.
contrib/userlock is gone, but user-level locking still exists,
and is exposed via the pg_advisory* family of functions.
2011-11-10 17:54:27 -05:00
Magnus Hagander d8ea33f2c0 Support configurable eventlog application names on Windows
This allows different instances to use the eventlog with different
identifiers, by setting the event_source GUC, similar to how
syslog_ident works.

Original patch by MauMau, heavily modified by Magnus Hagander
2011-10-25 20:02:55 +02:00
Bruce Momjian 0180bd6180 Remove all "traces" of trace_userlocks, because userlocks were removed
in PG 8.2.
2011-10-13 19:59:57 -04:00
Tom Lane a2822fb933 Support index-only scans using the visibility map to avoid heap fetches.
When a btree index contains all columns required by the query, and the
visibility map shows that all tuples on a target heap page are
visible-to-all, we don't need to fetch that heap page.  This patch depends
on the previous patches that made the visibility map reliable.

There's a fair amount left to do here, notably trying to figure out a less
chintzy way of estimating the cost of an index-only scan, but the core
functionality seems ready to commit.

Robert Haas and Ibrar Ahmed, with some previous work by Heikki Linnakangas.
2011-10-07 20:14:13 -04:00
Tom Lane 1a00c0ef53 Remove the custom_variable_classes parameter.
This variable provides only marginal error-prevention capability (since
it can only check the prefix of a qualified GUC name), and the consensus
is that that isn't worth the amount of hassle that maintaining the setting
creates for DBAs.  So, let's just remove it.

With this commit, the system will silently accept a value for any qualified
GUC name at all, whether it has anything to do with any known extension or
not.  (Unqualified names still have to match known built-in settings,
though; and you will get a WARNING at extension load time if there's an
unrecognized setting with that extension's prefix.)

There's still some discussion ongoing about whether to tighten that up and
if so how; but if we do come up with a solution, it's not likely to look
anything like custom_variable_classes.
2011-10-04 12:36:55 -04:00
Tom Lane d56b3afc03 Restructure error handling in reading of postgresql.conf.
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
2011-10-02 16:50:04 -04:00
Tom Lane a32dd16459 Update and extend the EXPLAIN-related documentation.
I've made a significant effort at filling in the "Using EXPLAIN" section
to be reasonably complete about mentioning everything that EXPLAIN can
output, including the "Rows Removed" outputs that were added by Marko
Tiikkaja's recent documentation-free patch.  I also updated the examples to
be consistent with current behavior; several of them were not close to what
the current code will do.  No doubt there's more that can be done here, but
I'm out of patience for today.
2011-09-28 19:39:54 -04:00
Simon Riggs e5e2f7b054 synchronous_commit is an enum not a boolean.
Jaime Casanova
2011-09-23 08:35:33 +01:00
Tom Lane ca4af308c3 Simplify handling of the timezone GUC by making initdb choose the default.
We were doing some amazingly complicated things in order to avoid running
the very expensive identify_system_timezone() procedure during GUC
initialization.  But there is an obvious fix for that, which is to do it
once during initdb and have initdb install the system-specific default into
postgresql.conf, as it already does for most other GUC variables that need
system-environment-dependent defaults.  This means that the timezone (and
log_timezone) settings no longer have any magic behavior in the server.
Per discussion.
2011-09-09 17:59:11 -04:00
Bruce Momjian 5c8676ea71 Add documentation link to strftime supported options. 2011-09-05 22:58:10 -04:00
Heikki Linnakangas 5cfe33fe7b The replication status values in pg_stat_replication was changed to
lowercase earlier, but documentation was not updated. Update the docs.

Fujii Masao
2011-08-31 12:37:37 +03:00
Tom Lane cff75130b5 Remove wal_sender_delay GUC, because it's no longer useful.
The latch infrastructure is now capable of detecting all cases where the
walsender loop needs to wake up, so there is no reason to have an arbitrary
timeout.

Also, modify the walsender loop logic to follow the standard pattern of
ResetLatch, test for work to do, WaitLatch.  The previous coding was both
hard to follow and buggy: it would sometimes busy-loop despite having
nothing available to do, eg between receipt of a signal and the next time
it was caught up with new WAL, and it also had interesting choices like
deciding to update to WALSNDSTATE_STREAMING on the strength of information
known to be obsolete.
2011-08-10 18:50:28 -04:00
Tom Lane ffcf5a6c41 Fix thinko in documentation of local_preload_libraries.
Somebody added a cross-reference to shared_preload_libraries, but wrote the
wrong variable name when they did it (and didn't bother to make it a link
either).

Spotted by Christoph Anton Mitterer.
2011-08-05 21:18:02 -04:00
Bruce Momjian 4262e61d64 Fix markup for recent wal_level clarification.
Backpatch to 9.1 and 9.0.
2011-08-04 15:02:02 -04:00
Bruce Momjian 38de5aad54 In documentaiton, clarify which commands have reduced WAL volume for
wal_level = minimum.

Backpatch to 9.1 and 9.0.
2011-08-04 12:06:53 -04:00
Simon Riggs 6ba77bce93 Minor doc additions for cascading replication. 2011-07-19 09:07:42 +01:00
Simon Riggs 5286105800 Cascading replication feature for streaming log-based replication.
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
2011-07-19 03:40:03 +01:00
Tom Lane 23e5b16c71 Add temp_file_limit GUC parameter to constrain temporary file space usage.
The limit is enforced against the total amount of temp file space used by
each session.

Mark Kirkwood, reviewed by Cédric Villemain and Tatsuo Ishii
2011-07-17 14:19:31 -04:00
Tom Lane 60a81ad133 Reclassify replication-related GUC variables as "master" and "standby".
Per discussion, this structure seems more understandable than what was
there before.  Make config.sgml and postgresql.conf.sample agree.

In passing do a bit of editorial work on the variable descriptions.
2011-07-07 15:11:41 -04:00
Peter Eisentraut d479a0f92f Small documentation tweaks 2011-07-05 00:00:14 +03:00
Heikki Linnakangas f7ea6beaf4 Remove silent_mode. You get the same functionality with "pg_ctl -l
postmaster.log", or nohup.

There was a small issue with LINUX_OOM_ADJ and silent_mode, namely that with
silent_mode the postmaster process incorrectly used the OOM settings meant
for backend processes. We certainly could've fixed that directly, but since
silent_mode was redundant anyway, we might as well just remove it.
2011-07-04 14:35:44 +03:00
Robert Haas 7095003cbe Make deadlock_timeout PGC_SUSET rather than PGC_SIGHUP.
This allows deadlock_timeout to be reduced for transactions that are
particularly likely to be involved in a deadlock, thus detecting it
more quickly.  It is also potentially useful as a poor-man's deadlock
priority mechanism: a transaction with a high deadlock_timeout is less
likely to be chosen as the victim than one with a low
deadlock_timeout.  Since that could be used to game the system, we
make this PGC_SUSET rather than PGC_USERSET.

At some point, it might be worth thinking about a more explicit
priority mechanism, since using this is far from fool-proof.  But
let's see whether there's enough use case to justify the additional
work before we go down that route.

Noah Misch, reviewed by Shigeru Hanada
2011-06-21 22:36:59 -04:00
Peter Eisentraut 8a8fbe7e79 Capitalization fixes 2011-06-19 00:37:30 +03:00
Robert Haas 2202891669 Remove parentheses from mention of current_schemas function.
This is more consistent with what we do elsewhere, and hopefully avoids
creating the perception that current_schemas takes no arguments.

As suggested by Brendan Jurd
2011-06-13 13:02:54 -04:00
Robert Haas 2a89042142 Add doc cross-reference to search_path discussion of current_schemas().
Brendan Jurd
2011-06-13 12:37:49 -04:00
Robert Haas dfe8ec3ab9 Document GUC context for synchronous_standby_names/hot_standby_feedback.
Fujii Masao
2011-06-13 12:23:42 -04:00
Peter Eisentraut cb0defe523 Correct description of log_connections and log_disconnections
The previous claim when these parameters could be changed was
incorrect.

Fujii Masao
2011-05-29 21:59:10 +03:00
Peter Eisentraut c13dc6402b Spell checking and markup refinement 2011-05-19 01:14:45 +03:00
Tom Lane 1453cd8f82 Adjust documentation with respect to "unknown" timezone setting.
The recent cleanup of GUC assign hooks got rid of the kludge of using
"unknown" as a magic value for timezone and log_timezone.  But I forgot
to update the documentation to match, as noted by Martin Pitt.
2011-05-10 13:48:40 -04:00
Alvaro Herrera 52897e54db Update some ALTER USER cross-references to ALTER ROLE
Greg Smith
2011-05-02 13:40:24 -03:00
Tom Lane bb1051eb2d Make a quick copy-editing pass over the 9.1 release notes.
Also remove the material about this being an alpha release.

The notes still need a lot of work, but they're more or less presentable
as a beta version now.
2011-04-27 16:52:02 -04:00
Alvaro Herrera 38d15f1651 Change "Id" to "id" in some SGML tags
Gabriele Bartolini
2011-04-05 15:06:06 -03:00
Robert Haas 240067b3b0 Merge synchronous_replication setting into synchronous_commit.
This means one less thing to configure when setting up synchronous
replication, and also avoids some ambiguity around what the behavior
should be when the settings of these variables conflict.

Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me.
2011-04-04 16:25:52 -04:00
Heikki Linnakangas 647f8b3dba Reword the phrase on zero replication_timeout in the docs. 2011-03-31 10:19:29 +03:00
Heikki Linnakangas 754baa21f7 Automatically terminate replication connections that are idle for more
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
2011-03-30 10:20:37 +03:00
Robert Haas 9a56dc3389 Fix various possible problems with synchronous replication.
1. Don't ignore query cancel interrupts.  Instead, if the user asks to
cancel the query after we've already committed it, but before it's on
the standby, just emit a warning and let the COMMIT finish.

2. Don't ignore die interrupts (pg_terminate_backend or fast shutdown).
Instead, emit a warning message and close the connection without
acknowledging the commit.  Other backends will still see the effect of
the commit, but there's no getting around that; it's too late to abort
at this point, and ignoring die interrupts altogether doesn't seem like
a good idea.

3. If synchronous_standby_names becomes empty, wake up all backends
waiting for synchronous replication to complete.  Without this, someone
attempting to shut synchronous replication off could easily wedge the
entire system instead.

4. Avoid depending on the assumption that if a walsender updates
MyProc->syncRepState, we'll see the change even if we read it without
holding the lock.  The window for this appears to be quite narrow (and
probably doesn't exist at all on machines with strong memory ordering)
but protecting against it is practically free, so do that.

5. Remove useless state SYNC_REP_MUST_DISCONNECT, which isn't needed and
doesn't actually do anything.

There's still some further work needed here to make the behavior of fast
shutdown plausible, but that looks complex, so I'm leaving it for a
separate commit.  Review by Fujii Masao.
2011-03-17 13:12:21 -04:00
Bruce Momjian e148443ddd Document guc context values, and reference them from the config doc section.
Tom Lane
2011-03-17 00:27:01 -04:00
Bruce Momjian df4a9595c2 Wording adjustment for restart_after_crash entry
Specifically, mention that "restart" is disabled by this parameter.
2011-03-15 12:43:39 -04:00
Robert Haas f0f3617135 Minor sync rep documentation improvements.
- Make the name of the ID tag for the GUC entry match the GUC name.
- Clarify that synchronous_replication waits for xlog flush, not receipt.
- Mention that synchronous_replication won't wait if max_wal_senders=0.
2011-03-15 11:25:04 -04:00
Bruce Momjian 7a8f43968a In docs, rename "backwards compatibility" to "backward compatibility"
for consistency.
2011-03-11 14:33:10 -05:00
Bruce Momjian a1bb5a480d Document how listen_addresses can do only IPv4 or IPv6. 2011-03-11 10:31:43 -05:00
Itagaki Takahiro 1144726d07 synchronous_standby_names is a string parameter. 2011-03-09 19:49:16 +09:00
Robert Haas c74d3aceb9 Synchronous replication doc corrections.
Thom Brown
2011-03-07 11:59:58 -05:00
Simon Riggs a8a8a3e096 Efficient transaction-controlled synchronous replication.
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.
2011-03-06 22:49:16 +00:00
Robert Haas 59d6a75942 Avoid excessive Hot Standby feedback messages.
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.
2011-03-01 11:34:25 -05:00
Heikki Linnakangas be6668d6ef Increase the default for wal_sender_delay from 200ms to 1s. Now that WAL
sender is immediately woken up by transaction commit, there's no need to
wake up so aggressively.
2011-02-26 23:38:25 +02:00
Simon Riggs bca8b7f16a Hot Standby feedback for avoidance of cleanup conflicts on standby.
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
2011-02-16 19:29:37 +00:00
Robert Haas 883a9659fa Assorted corrections to the patch to add WAL receiver replies.
Per reports from Fujii Masao.
2011-02-15 12:05:00 -05:00
Robert Haas 6a77e9385e Rename max_predicate_locks_per_transaction.
The new name, max_pred_locks_per_transaction, is shorter.

Kevin Grittner, per discussion.
2011-02-15 08:04:55 -05:00
Heikki Linnakangas b186523fd9 Send status updates back from standby server to master, indicating how far
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.
2011-02-10 21:04:02 +02:00
Robert Haas 32896c40ca Avoid having autovacuum workers wait for relation locks.
Waiting for relation locks can lead to starvation - it pins down an
autovacuum worker for as long as the lock is held.  But if we're doing
an anti-wraparound vacuum, then we still wait; maintenance can no longer
be put off.

To assist with troubleshooting, if log_autovacuum_min_duration >= 0,
we log whenever an autovacuum or autoanalyze is skipped for this reason.

Per a gripe by Josh Berkus, and ensuing discussion.
2011-02-07 22:04:29 -05:00
Heikki Linnakangas dafaa3efb7 Implement genuine serializable isolation level.
Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.

To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.

A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.

Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.

We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.

Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.

Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
2011-02-08 00:09:08 +02:00
Bruce Momjian ad76242633 remove tags. 2011-02-06 18:44:43 -05:00
Robert Haas 0af695fd43 Log restartpoints in the same fashion as checkpoints.
Prior to 9.0, restartpoints never created, deleted, or recycled WAL
files, but now they can.  This code makes log_checkpoints treat
checkpoints and restartpoints symmetrically.  It also adjusts up
the documentation of the parameter to mention restartpoints.

Fujii Masao.  Docs by me, as suggested by Itagaki Takahiro.
2011-02-02 21:08:53 -05:00
Bruce Momjian d56d246e70 Properly capitalize hyphenated words in documentation titles. 2011-02-01 17:00:26 -05:00
Bruce Momjian 7106f74e2a Clarify documentation to state that "zero_damaged_pages" does not force
data to disk, so the table or index should be recreated before the
parameter is turned off again.
2011-02-01 16:44:22 -05:00
Bruce Momjian 6c6e6f7fd3 Document that effective cache size does not assume data remains in the
cache between queries.
2011-02-01 15:23:35 -05:00
Itagaki Takahiro 03282bfa89 Add a link from client_encoding parameter to the list of character sets
in documentation.

Thom Brown
2011-02-01 14:26:17 +09:00
Bruce Momjian 5d5678d7c3 Properly capitalize documentation headings; some only had initial-word
capitalization.
2011-01-29 13:01:48 -05:00
Magnus Hagander 048d148fe6 Add pg_basebackup tool for streaming base backups
This tool makes it possible to do the pg_start_backup/
copy files/pg_stop_backup step in a single command.

There are still some steps to be done before this is a
complete backup solution, such as the ability to stream
the required WAL logs, but it's still usable, and
could do with some buildfarm coverage.

In passing, make the checkpoint request optionally
fast instead of hardcoding it.

Magnus Hagander, reviewed by Fujii Masao and Dimitri Fontaine
2011-01-23 12:21:23 +01:00
Tom Lane 0f73aae13d Allow the wal_buffers setting to be auto-tuned to a reasonable value.
If wal_buffers is initially set to -1 (which is now the default), it's
replaced by 1/32nd of shared_buffers, with a minimum of 8 (the old default)
and a maximum of the XLOG segment size.  The allowed range for manual
settings is still from 4 up to whatever will fit in shared memory.

Greg Smith, with implementation correction by me.
2011-01-22 20:31:24 -05:00
Robert Haas 7a32ff9732 Revert patch adding support for logging the current role.
This reverts commit a8a8867912, committed
by me earlier today (2011-01-12).  This isn't safe inside an aborted
transaction.

Noted by Tom Lane.
2011-01-12 11:59:21 -05:00
Robert Haas a8a8867912 Add support for logging the current role.
Stephen Frost, with some editorialization by me.
2011-01-12 11:34:53 -05:00
Tom Lane 576477e73c Force default wal_sync_method to be fdatasync on Linux.
Recent versions of the Linux system header files cause xlogdefs.h to
believe that open_datasync should be the default sync method, whereas
formerly fdatasync was the default on Linux.  open_datasync is a bad
choice, first because it doesn't actually outperform fdatasync (in fact
the reverse), and second because we try to use O_DIRECT with it, causing
failures on certain filesystems (e.g., ext4 with data=journal option).
This part of the patch is largely per a proposal from Marti Raudsepp.
More extensive changes are likely to follow in HEAD, but this is as much
change as we want to back-patch.

Also clean up confusing code and incorrect documentation surrounding the
fsync_writethrough option.  Those changes shouldn't result in any actual
behavioral change, but I chose to back-patch them anyway to keep the
branches looking similar in this area.

In 9.0 and HEAD, also do some copy-editing on the WAL Reliability
documentation section.

Back-patch to all supported branches, since any of them might get used
on modern Linux versions.
2010-12-08 20:01:09 -05:00
Simon Riggs e620ee35b2 Optimize commit_siblings in two ways to improve group commit.
First, avoid scanning the whole ProcArray once we know there
are at least commit_siblings active; second, skip the check
altogether if commit_siblings = 0.

Greg Smith
2010-12-08 18:48:03 +00:00
Tom Lane c623365ff9 Point out in default_tablespace's description that CREATE DATABASE ignores it.
Per gripe from Andreas Scherbaum.
2010-11-27 16:08:32 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut fc946c39ae Remove useless whitespace at end of lines 2010-11-23 22:34:55 +02:00
Robert Haas 5a12c808cf Note that effective_io_concurrency only affects bitmap heap scans.
Josh Kupershmidt
2010-10-26 21:44:14 -04:00
Bruce Momjian f75d6a1b19 Add mention of using tools/fsync to test fsync methods. Restructure
recent wal_sync_method doc paragraph to be clearer.
2010-10-19 14:56:53 +00:00
Robert Haas 694c56af2b Improve WAL reliability documentation, and add more cross-references to it.
In particular, we are now more explicit about the fact that you may need
wal_sync_method=fsync_writethrough for crash-safety on some platforms,
including MaxOS X.  There's also now an explicit caution against assuming
that the default setting of wal_sync_method is either crash-safe or best
for performance.
2010-10-07 12:22:00 -04:00
Magnus Hagander 9f2e211386 Remove cvs keywords from all files. 2010-09-20 22:08:53 +02:00
Tom Lane 73b3bd5574 Document the existence of the socket lock file under unix_socket_directory,
which is perhaps not a terribly good spot for it but there doesn't seem to be
a better place.  Also add a source-code comment pointing out a couple reasons
for having a separate lock file.  Per suggestion from Greg Smith.
2010-08-26 22:00:19 +00:00
Bruce Momjian c107c35df3 Update autovacuum_freeze_max_age documentation to mention that the
default is low because of pg_clog file removal.

Backpatch to 9.0.X.
2010-08-24 13:32:25 +00:00
Tom Lane 005e427a22 Make an editorial pass over the 9.0 release notes.
This is mostly about grammar, style, and presentation, though I did find
a few small factual errors.
2010-08-23 02:43:25 +00:00