Commit Graph

398 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Tom Lane 62aba76568 Prevent indirect security attacks via changing session-local state within
an allegedly immutable index function.  It was previously recognized that
we had to prevent such a function from executing SET/RESET ROLE/SESSION
AUTHORIZATION, or it could trivially obtain the privileges of the session
user.  However, since there is in general no privilege checking for changes
of session-local state, it is also possible for such a function to change
settings in a way that might subvert later operations in the same session.
Examples include changing search_path to cause an unexpected function to
be called, or replacing an existing prepared statement with another one
that will execute a function of the attacker's choosing.

The present patch secures VACUUM, ANALYZE, and CREATE INDEX/REINDEX against
these threats, which are the same places previously deemed to need protection
against the SET ROLE issue.  GUC changes are still allowed, since there are
many useful cases for that, but we prevent security problems by forcing a
rollback of any GUC change after completing the operation.  Other cases are
handled by throwing an error if any change is attempted; these include temp
table creation, closing a cursor, and creating or deleting a prepared
statement.  (In 7.4, the infrastructure to roll back GUC changes doesn't
exist, so we settle for rejecting changes of "search_path" in these contexts.)

Original report and patch by Gurjeet Singh, additional analysis by
Tom Lane.

Security: CVE-2009-4136
2009-12-09 21:57:51 +00:00
Tom Lane 0cb65564e5 Add exclusion constraints, which generalize the concept of uniqueness to
support any indexable commutative operator, not just equality.  Two rows
violate the exclusion constraint if "row1.col OP row2.col" is TRUE for
each of the columns in the constraint.

Jeff Davis, reviewed by Robert Haas
2009-12-07 05:22:23 +00:00
Tom Lane 5e66a51c2e Provide a parenthesized-options syntax for VACUUM, analogous to that recently
adopted for EXPLAIN.  This will allow additional options to be implemented
in future without having to make them fully-reserved keywords.  The old syntax
remains available for existing options, however.

Itagaki Takahiro
2009-11-16 21:32:07 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera e7ec022266 Fix longstanding problems in VACUUM caused by untimely interruptions
In VACUUM FULL, an interrupt after the initial transaction has been recorded
as committed can cause postmaster to restart with the following error message:
PANIC: cannot abort transaction NNNN, it was already committed
This problem has been reported many times.

In lazy VACUUM, an interrupt after the table has been truncated by
lazy_truncate_heap causes other backends' relcache to still point to the
removed pages; this can cause future INSERT and UPDATE queries to error out
with the following error message:
could not read block XX of relation 1663/NNN/MMMM: read only 0 of 8192 bytes
The window to this race condition is extremely narrow, but it has been seen in
the wild involving a cancelled autovacuum process.

The solution for both problems is to inhibit interrupts in both operations
until after the respective transactions have been committed.  It's not a
complete solution, because the transaction could theoretically be aborted by
some other error, but at least fixes the most common causes of both problems.
2009-11-10 18:00:06 +00:00
Tom Lane 9f2ee8f287 Re-implement EvalPlanQual processing to improve its performance and eliminate
a lot of strange behaviors that occurred in join cases.  We now identify the
"current" row for every joined relation in UPDATE, DELETE, and SELECT FOR
UPDATE/SHARE queries.  If an EvalPlanQual recheck is necessary, we jam the
appropriate row into each scan node in the rechecking plan, forcing it to emit
only that one row.  The former behavior could rescan the whole of each joined
relation for each recheck, which was terrible for performance, and what's much
worse could result in duplicated output tuples.

Also, the original implementation of EvalPlanQual could not re-use the recheck
execution tree --- it had to go through a full executor init and shutdown for
every row to be tested.  To avoid this overhead, I've associated a special
runtime Param with each LockRows or ModifyTable plan node, and arranged to
make every scan node below such a node depend on that Param.  Thus, by
signaling a change in that Param, the EPQ machinery can just rescan the
already-built test plan.

This patch also adds a prohibition on set-returning functions in the
targetlist of SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE.  This is needed to avoid the
duplicate-output-tuple problem.  It seems fairly reasonable since the
other restrictions on SELECT FOR UPDATE are meant to ensure that there
is a unique correspondence between source tuples and result tuples,
which an output SRF destroys as much as anything else does.
2009-10-26 02:26:45 +00:00
Tom Lane 794e3e81a0 Force VACUUM to recalculate oldestXmin even when we haven't changed our
own database's datfrozenxid, if the current value is old enough to be
forcing autovacuums or warning messages.  This ensures that a bogus
value is replaced as soon as possible.  Per a comment from Heikki.
2009-09-01 04:46:49 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera a8bb8eb583 Remove flatfiles.c, which is now obsolete.
Recent commits have removed the various uses it was supporting.  It was a
performance bottleneck, according to bug report #4919 by Lauris Ulmanis; seems
it slowed down user creation after a billion users.
2009-09-01 02:54:52 +00:00
Tom Lane 25ec228ef7 Track the current XID wrap limit (or more accurately, the oldest unfrozen
XID) in checkpoint records.  This eliminates the need to recompute the value
from scratch during database startup, which is one of the two remaining
reasons for the flatfile code to exist.  It should also simplify life for
hot-standby operation.

To avoid bloating the checkpoint records unreasonably, I switched from
tracking the oldest database by name to tracking it by OID.  This turns
out to save cycles in general (everywhere but the warning-generating
paths, which we hardly care about) and also helps us deal with the case
that the oldest database got dropped instead of being vacuumed.  The prior
coding might go for a long time without updating the wrap limit in that case,
which is bad because it might result in a lot of useless autovacuum activity.
2009-08-31 02:23:23 +00:00
Tom Lane 7fc7a7c4d0 Fix a violation of WAL coding rules in the recent patch to include an
"all tuples visible" flag in heap page headers.  The flag update *must*
be applied before calling XLogInsert, but heap_update and the tuple
moving routines in VACUUM FULL were ignoring this rule.  A crash and
replay could therefore leave the flag incorrectly set, causing rows
to appear visible in seqscans when they should not be.  This might explain
recent reports of data corruption from Jeff Ross and others.

In passing, do a bit of editorialization on comments in visibilitymap.c.
2009-08-24 02:18:32 +00:00
Bruce Momjian d747140279 8.4 pgindent run, with new combined Linux/FreeBSD/MinGW typedef list
provided by Andrew.
2009-06-11 14:49:15 +00:00
Tom Lane 32ea236361 Improve the IndexVacuumInfo/IndexBulkDeleteResult API to allow somewhat sane
behavior in cases where we don't know the heap tuple count accurately; in
particular partial vacuum, but this also makes the API a bit more useful
for ANALYZE.  This patch adds "estimated_count" flags to both structs so
that an approximate count can be flagged as such, and adjusts the logic
so that approximate counts are not used for updating pg_class.reltuples.

This fixes my previous complaint that VACUUM was putting ridiculous values
into pg_class.reltuples for indexes.  The actual impact of that bug is
limited, because the planner only pays attention to reltuples for an index
if the index is partial; which probably explains why beta testers hadn't
noticed a degradation in plan quality from it.  But it needs to be fixed.

The whole thing is a bit messy and should be redesigned in future, because
reltuples now has the potential to drift quite far away from reality when
a long period elapses with no non-partial vacuums.  But this is as good as
it's going to get for 8.4.
2009-06-06 22:13:52 +00:00
Tom Lane 948d6ec90f Modify the relcache to record the temp status of both local and nonlocal
temp relations; this is no more expensive than before, now that we have
pg_class.relistemp.  Insert tests into bufmgr.c to prevent attempting
to fetch pages from nonlocal temp relations.  This provides a low-level
defense against bugs-of-omission allowing temp pages to be loaded into shared
buffers, as in the contrib/pgstattuple problem reported by Stuart Bishop.
While at it, tweak a bunch of places to use new relcache tests (instead of
expensive probes into pg_namespace) to detect local or nonlocal temp tables.
2009-03-31 22:12:48 +00:00
Tom Lane ff301d6e69 Implement "fastupdate" support for GIN indexes, in which we try to accumulate
multiple index entries in a holding area before adding them to the main index
structure.  This helps because bulk insert is (usually) significantly faster
than retail insert for GIN.

This patch also removes GIN support for amgettuple-style index scans.  The
API defined for amgettuple is difficult to support with fastupdate, and
the previously committed partial-match feature didn't really work with
it either.  We might eventually figure a way to put back amgettuple
support, but it won't happen for 8.4.

catversion bumped because of change in GIN's pg_am entry, and because
the format of GIN indexes changed on-disk (there's a metapage now,
and possibly a pending list).

Teodor Sigaev
2009-03-24 20:17:18 +00:00
Heikki Linnakangas 6587818542 Add vacuum_freeze_table_age GUC option, to control when VACUUM should
ignore the visibility map and scan the whole table, to advance
relfrozenxid.
2009-01-16 13:27:24 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 511db38ace Update copyright for 2009. 2009-01-01 17:24:05 +00:00
Heikki Linnakangas dcf8409985 Don't reset pg_class.reltuples and relpages in VACUUM, if any pages were
skipped. We could update relpages anyway, but it seems better to only
update it together with reltuples, because we use the reltuples/relpages
ratio in the planner. Also don't update n_live_tuples in pgstat.

ANALYZE in VACUUM ANALYZE now needs to update pg_class, if the
VACUUM-phase didn't do so. Added some boolean-passing to let analyze_rel
know if it should update pg_class or not.

I also moved the relcache invalidation (to update rd_targblock) from
vac_update_relstats to where RelationTruncate is called, because
vac_update_relstats is not called for partial vacuums anymore. It's more
obvious to send the invalidation close to the truncation that requires it.

Per report by Ned T. Crigler.
2008-12-17 09:15:03 +00:00
Heikki Linnakangas 608195a3a3 Introduce visibility map. The visibility map is a bitmap with one bit per
heap page, where a set bit indicates that all tuples on the page are
visible to all transactions, and the page therefore doesn't need
vacuuming. It is stored in a new relation fork.

Lazy vacuum uses the visibility map to skip pages that don't need
vacuuming. Vacuum is also responsible for setting the bits in the map.
In the future, this can hopefully be used to implement index-only-scans,
but we can't currently guarantee that the visibility map is always 100%
up-to-date.

In addition to the visibility map, there's a new PD_ALL_VISIBLE flag on
each heap page, also indicating that all tuples on the page are visible to
all transactions. It's important that this flag is kept up-to-date. It
is also used to skip visibility tests in sequential scans, which gives a
small performance gain on seqscans.
2008-12-03 13:05:22 +00:00
Heikki Linnakangas 3396000684 Rethink the way FSM truncation works. Instead of WAL-logging FSM
truncations in FSM code, call FreeSpaceMapTruncateRel from smgr_redo. To
make that cleaner from modularity point of view, move the WAL-logging one
level up to RelationTruncate, and move RelationTruncate and all the
related WAL-logging to new src/backend/catalog/storage.c file. Introduce
new RelationCreateStorage and RelationDropStorage functions that are used
instead of calling smgrcreate/smgrscheduleunlink directly. Move the
pending rel deletion stuff from smgrcreate/smgrscheduleunlink to the new
functions. This leaves smgr.c as a thin wrapper around md.c; all the
transactional stuff is now in storage.c.

This will make it easier to add new forks with similar truncation logic,
like the visibility map.
2008-11-19 10:34:52 +00:00
Tom Lane c5451c22e3 Make relhasrules and relhastriggers work like relhasindex, namely we let
VACUUM reset them to false rather than trying to clean 'em up during DROP.
2008-11-10 00:49:37 +00:00
Heikki Linnakangas 19c8dc839b Unite ReadBufferWithFork, ReadBufferWithStrategy, and ZeroOrReadBuffer
functions into one ReadBufferExtended function, that takes the strategy
and mode as argument. There's three modes, RBM_NORMAL which is the default
used by plain ReadBuffer(), RBM_ZERO, which replaces ZeroOrReadBuffer, and
a new mode RBM_ZERO_ON_ERROR, which allows callers to read corrupt pages
without throwing an error. The FSM needs the new mode to recover from
corrupt pages, which could happend if we crash after extending an FSM file,
and the new page is "torn".

Add fork number to some error messages in bufmgr.c, that still lacked it.
2008-10-31 15:05:00 +00:00
Heikki Linnakangas 15c121b3ed Rewrite the FSM. Instead of relying on a fixed-size shared memory segment, the
free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each
relation (except for hash indexes; they don't use FSM).

This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC options; remove any
trace of them from the backend, initdb, and documentation.

Rewrite contrib/pg_freespacemap to match the new FSM implementation. Also
introduce a new variant of the get_raw_page(regclass, int4, int4) function in
contrib/pageinspect that let's you to return pages from any relation fork, and
a new fsm_page_contents() function to inspect the new FSM pages.
2008-09-30 10:52:14 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera d53a56687f Initialize the minimum frozen Xid in vac_update_datfrozenxid using
GetOldestXmin() instead of RecentGlobalXmin; this is safer because we do not
depend on the latter being correctly set elsewhere, and while it is more
expensive, this code path is not performance-critical.  This is a real
risk for autovacuum, because it can execute whole cycles without doing
a single vacuum, which would mean that RecentGlobalXmin would stay at its
initialization value, FirstNormalTransactionId, causing a bogus value to be
inserted in pg_database.  This bug could explain some recent reports of
failure to truncate pg_clog.

At the same time, change the initialization of RecentGlobalXmin to
InvalidTransactionId, and ensure that it's set to something else whenever
it's going to be used.  Using it as FirstNormalTransactionId in HOT page
pruning could incur in data loss.  InitPostgres takes care of setting it
to a valid value, but the extra checks are there to prevent "special"
backends from behaving in unusual ways.

Per Tom Lane's detailed problem dissection in 29544.1221061979@sss.pgh.pa.us
2008-09-11 14:01:10 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera 3ccde312ec Have autovacuum consider processing TOAST tables separately from their
main tables.

This requires vacuum() to accept processing a toast table standalone, so
there's a user-visible change in that it's now possible (for a superuser) to
execute "VACUUM pg_toast.pg_toast_XXX".
2008-08-13 00:07:50 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera 9319fd89e1 Modify vacuum() to accept a single relation OID instead of a list (which we
always pass as a single element anyway.)  In passing, fix an outdated comment.
2008-06-05 15:47:32 +00:00
Tom Lane 93c701edc6 Add support for tracking call counts and elapsed runtime for user-defined
functions.

Note that because this patch changes FmgrInfo, any external C functions
you might be testing with 8.4 will need to be recompiled.

Patch by Martin Pihlak, some editorialization by me (principally, removing
tracking of getrusage() numbers)
2008-05-15 00:17:41 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera 5da9da71c4 Improve snapshot manager by keeping explicit track of snapshots.
There are two ways to track a snapshot: there's the "registered" list, which
is used for arbitrary long-lived snapshots; and there's the "active stack",
which is used for the snapshot that is considered "active" at any time.
This also allows users of snapshots to stop worrying about snapshot memory
allocation and freeing, and about using PG_TRY blocks around ActiveSnapshot
assignment.  This is all done automatically now.

As a consequence, this allows us to reset MyProc->xmin when there are no
more snapshots registered in the current backend, reducing the impact that
long-running transactions have on VACUUM.
2008-05-12 20:02:02 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera f8c4d7db60 Restructure some header files a bit, in particular heapam.h, by removing some
unnecessary #include lines in it.  Also, move some tuple routine prototypes and
macros to htup.h, which allows removal of heapam.h inclusion from some .c
files.

For this to work, a new header file access/sysattr.h needed to be created,
initially containing attribute numbers of system columns, for pg_dump usage.

While at it, make contrib ltree, intarray and hstore header files more
consistent with our header style.
2008-05-12 00:00:54 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera 73b0300b2a Move the HTSU_Result enum definition into snapshot.h, to avoid including
tqual.h into heapam.h.  This makes all inclusion of tqual.h explicit.

I also sorted alphabetically the includes on some source files.
2008-03-26 21:10:39 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera 78f02ca1f5 Rename snapmgmt.c/h to snapmgr.c/h, for consistency with other files.
Per complaint from Tom Lane.
2008-03-26 18:48:59 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera d43b085d57 Separate snapshot management code from tuple visibility code, create a
snapmgmt.c file for the former.  The header files have also been reorganized
in three parts: the most basic snapshot definitions are now in a new file
snapshot.h, and the also new snapmgmt.h keeps the definitions for snapmgmt.c.
tqual.h has been reduced to the bare minimum.

This patch is just a first step towards managing live snapshots within a
transaction; there is no functionality change.

Per my proposal to pgsql-patches on 20080318191940.GB27458@alvh.no-ip.org and
subsequent discussion.
2008-03-26 16:20:48 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera a9686591d7 We no longer need a snapshot set after opening the finishing transaction: this
is redundant because autovacuum now always analyzes a single table per
transaction.
2008-03-19 14:18:21 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera adc4e1e635 Fix vacuum so that autovacuum is really not cancelled when doing an emergency
job (i.e. to prevent Xid wraparound problems.)  Bug reported by ITAGAKI
Takahiro in 20080314103837.63D3.52131E4D@oss.ntt.co.jp, though I didn't use his
patch.
2008-03-14 17:25:59 +00:00
Tom Lane 3fcc7e8e18 Reduce memory consumption during VACUUM of large relations, by using
FSMPageData (6 bytes) instead of PageFreeSpaceInfo (8 or 16 bytes)
for the temporary array of page-free-space information.

Itagaki Takahiro
2008-03-10 02:04:10 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera f78611bba4 Improve error messages emitted when VACUUM and ANALYZE skip a table.
Per gripe from Clodoaldo Pinto Neto on
Message-ID: <a595de7a0801060326qbfc790ax2a60573043c2e2be@mail.gmail.com>
2008-02-20 14:31:35 +00:00
Tom Lane c931c07124 Repair VACUUM FULL bug introduced by HOT patch: the original way of
calculating a page's initial free space was fine, and should not have been
"improved" by letting PageGetHeapFreeSpace do it.  VACUUM FULL is going to
reclaim LP_DEAD line pointers later, so there is no need for a guard
against the page being too full of line pointers, and having one risks
rejecting pages that are perfectly good move destinations.

This also exposed a second bug, which is that the empty_end_pages logic
assumed that any page with no live tuples would get entered into the
fraged_pages list automatically (by virtue of having more free space than
the threshold in the do_frag calculation).  This assumption certainly
seems risky when a low fillfactor has been chosen, and even without
tunable fillfactor I think it could conceivably fail on a page with many
unused line pointers.  So fix the code to force do_frag true when notup
is true, and patch this part of the fix all the way back.

Per report from Tomas Szepe.
2008-02-11 19:14:30 +00:00
Tom Lane eedb068c0a Make standard maintenance operations (including VACUUM, ANALYZE, REINDEX,
and CLUSTER) execute as the table owner rather than the calling user, using
the same privilege-switching mechanism already used for SECURITY DEFINER
functions.  The purpose of this change is to ensure that user-defined
functions used in index definitions cannot acquire the privileges of a
superuser account that is performing routine maintenance.  While a function
used in an index is supposed to be IMMUTABLE and thus not able to do anything
very interesting, there are several easy ways around that restriction; and
even if we could plug them all, there would remain a risk of reading sensitive
information and broadcasting it through a covert channel such as CPU usage.

To prevent bypassing this security measure, execution of SET SESSION
AUTHORIZATION and SET ROLE is now forbidden within a SECURITY DEFINER context.

Thanks to Itagaki Takahiro for reporting this vulnerability.

Security: CVE-2007-6600
2008-01-03 21:23:15 +00:00
Bruce Momjian 9098ab9e32 Update copyrights in source tree to 2008. 2008-01-01 19:46:01 +00:00
Bruce Momjian fdf5a5efb7 pgindent run for 8.3. 2007-11-15 21:14:46 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera 745c1b2c2a Rearrange vacuum-related bits in PGPROC as a bitmask, to better support
having several of them.  Add two more flags: whether the process is
executing an ANALYZE, and whether a vacuum is for Xid wraparound (which
is obviously only set by autovacuum).

Sneakily move the worker's recently-acquired PostAuthDelay to a more useful
place.
2007-10-24 20:55:36 +00:00
Tom Lane 282d2a03dd HOT updates. When we update a tuple without changing any of its indexed
columns, and the new version can be stored on the same heap page, we no longer
generate extra index entries for the new version.  Instead, index searches
follow the HOT-chain links to ensure they find the correct tuple version.

In addition, this patch introduces the ability to "prune" dead tuples on a
per-page basis, without having to do a complete VACUUM pass to recover space.
VACUUM is still needed to clean up dead index entries, however.

Pavan Deolasee, with help from a bunch of other people.
2007-09-20 17:56:33 +00:00
Tom Lane 6889303531 Redefine the lp_flags field of item pointers as having four states, rather
than two independent bits (one of which was never used in heap pages anyway,
or at least hadn't been in a very long time).  This gives us flexibility to
add the HOT notions of redirected and dead item pointers without requiring
anything so klugy as magic values of lp_off and lp_len.  The state values
are chosen so that for the states currently in use (pre-HOT) there is no
change in the physical representation.
2007-09-12 22:10:26 +00:00
Tom Lane 6bd4f401b0 Replace the former method of determining snapshot xmax --- to wit, calling
ReadNewTransactionId from GetSnapshotData --- with a "latestCompletedXid"
variable that is updated during transaction commit or abort.  Since
latestCompletedXid is written only in places that had to lock ProcArrayLock
exclusively anyway, and is read only in places that had to lock ProcArrayLock
shared anyway, it adds no new locking requirements to the system despite being
cluster-wide.  Moreover, removing ReadNewTransactionId from snapshot
acquisition eliminates the need to take both XidGenLock and ProcArrayLock at
the same time.  Since XidGenLock is sometimes held across I/O this can be a
significant win.  Some preliminary benchmarking suggested that this patch has
no effect on average throughput but can significantly improve the worst-case
transaction times seen in pgbench.  Concept by Florian Pflug, implementation
by Tom Lane.
2007-09-08 20:31:15 +00:00
Tom Lane 295e63983d Implement lazy XID allocation: transactions that do not modify any database
rows will normally never obtain an XID at all.  We already did things this way
for subtransactions, but this patch extends the concept to top-level
transactions.  In applications where there are lots of short read-only
transactions, this should improve performance noticeably; not so much from
removal of the actual XID-assignments, as from reduction of overhead that's
driven by the rate of XID consumption.  We add a concept of a "virtual
transaction ID" so that active transactions can be uniquely identified even
if they don't have a regular XID.  This is a much lighter-weight concept:
uniqueness of VXIDs is only guaranteed over the short term, and no on-disk
record is made about them.

Florian Pflug, with some editorialization by Tom.
2007-09-05 18:10:48 +00:00
Tom Lane 647fd9a108 Fix two bugs induced in VACUUM FULL by async-commit patch.
First, we cannot assume that XLogAsyncCommitFlush guarantees hint bits will be
settable, because clog.c's inexact LSN bookkeeping results in windows where a
previously flushed transaction is considered unhintable because it shares an
LSN slot with a later unflushed transaction.  But repair_frag requires
XMIN_COMMITTED to be correct so that it can distinguish tuples moved by the
current vacuum.  Since not being able to set the bit is an uncommon corner
case, the most practical way of dealing with it seems to be to abandon
shrinking (ie, don't invoke repair_frag) when we find a non-dead tuple whose
XMIN_COMMITTED bit couldn't be set.

Second, it is possible for the same reason that a RECENTLY_DEAD tuple does not
get its XMAX_COMMITTED bit set during scan_heap.  But by the time repair_frag
examines the tuple it might be possible to set the bit.  We therefore must
take buffer content lock when calling HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum a second time,
else we can get an Assert failure in SetBufferCommitInfoNeedsSave.  This
latter bug is latent in existing releases, but I think it cannot actually
occur without async commit, since the first HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum call
should always have set the bit.  So I'm not going to back-patch it.

In passing, reduce the existing "cannot shrink relation" messages from NOTICE
to LOG level.  The new message must be no higher than LOG if we don't want
unpredictable regression test failures, and consistency seems like a good
idea.  Also arrange that only one such message is reported per VACUUM FULL;
in typical scenarios you could get spammed with many such messages, which
seems a bit useless.
2007-08-13 19:08:26 +00:00
Tom Lane 4a78cdeb6b Support an optional asynchronous commit mode, in which we don't flush WAL
before reporting a transaction committed.  Data consistency is still
guaranteed (unlike setting fsync = off), but a crash may lose the effects
of the last few transactions.  Patch by Simon, some editorialization by Tom.
2007-08-01 22:45:09 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera bd06ab29ae Avoid having autovacuum run multiple ANALYZE commands in a single transaction,
to prevent possible deadlock problems.  Per request from Tom Lane.
2007-06-14 13:53:14 +00:00
Tom Lane d526575f89 Make large sequential scans and VACUUMs work in a limited-size "ring" of
buffers, rather than blowing out the whole shared-buffer arena.  Aside from
avoiding cache spoliation, this fixes the problem that VACUUM formerly tended
to cause a WAL flush for every page it modified, because we had it hacked to
use only a single buffer.  Those flushes will now occur only once per
ring-ful.  The exact ring size, and the threshold for seqscans to switch into
the ring usage pattern, remain under debate; but the infrastructure seems
done.  The key bit of infrastructure is a new optional BufferAccessStrategy
object that can be passed to ReadBuffer operations; this replaces the former
StrategyHintVacuum API.

This patch also changes the buffer usage-count methodology a bit: we now
advance usage_count when first pinning a buffer, rather than when last
unpinning it.  To preserve the behavior that a buffer's lifetime starts to
decrease when it's released, the clock sweep code is modified to not decrement
usage_count of pinned buffers.

Work not done in this commit: teach GiST and GIN indexes to use the vacuum
BufferAccessStrategy for vacuum-driven fetches.

Original patch by Simon, reworked by Heikki and again by Tom.
2007-05-30 20:12:03 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera 3b0347b36e Move the tuple freezing point in CLUSTER to a point further back in the past,
to avoid losing useful Xid information in not-so-old tuples.  This makes
CLUSTER behave the same as VACUUM as far a tuple-freezing behavior goes
(though CLUSTER does not yet advance the table's relfrozenxid).

While at it, move the actual freezing operation in rewriteheap.c to a more
appropriate place, and document it thoroughly.  This part of the patch from
Tom Lane.
2007-05-17 15:28:29 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera e2a186b03c Add a multi-worker capability to autovacuum. This allows multiple worker
processes to be running simultaneously.  Also, now autovacuum processes do not
count towards the max_connections limit; they are counted separately from
regular processes, and are limited by the new GUC variable
autovacuum_max_workers.

The launcher now has intelligence to launch workers on each database every
autovacuum_naptime seconds, limited only on the max amount of worker slots
available.

Also, the global worker I/O utilization is limited by the vacuum cost-based
delay feature.  Workers are "balanced" so that the total I/O consumption does
not exceed the established limit.  This part of the patch was contributed by
ITAGAKI Takahiro.

Per discussion.
2007-04-16 18:30:04 +00:00
Tom Lane d3ff180163 Fix a longstanding bug in VACUUM FULL's handling of update chains. The code
did not expect that a DEAD tuple could follow a RECENTLY_DEAD tuple in an
update chain, but because the OldestXmin rule for determining deadness is a
simplification of reality, it is possible for this situation to occur
(implying that the RECENTLY_DEAD tuple is in fact dead to all observers,
but this patch does not attempt to exploit that).  The code would follow a
chain forward all the way, but then stop before a DEAD tuple when backing
up, meaning that not all of the chain got moved.  This could lead to copying
the chain multiple times (resulting in duplicate copies of the live tuple at
its end), or leaving dangling index entries behind (which, aside from
generating warnings from later vacuums, creates a risk of wrong query
results or bogus duplicate-key errors once the heap slot the index entry
points to is repopulated).

The fix is to recheck HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum while following a chain
forward, and to stop if a DEAD tuple is reached.  Each contiguous group
of RECENTLY_DEAD tuples will therefore be copied as a separate chain.
The patch also adds a couple of extra sanity checks to verify correct
behavior.

Per report and test case from Pavan Deolasee.
2007-03-14 18:48:55 +00:00