Commit Graph

1299 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Tom Lane a3bce17ef1 Automate the maintenance of SO_MINOR_VERSION for our shared libraries.
Up to now we've manually adjusted these numbers in several different
Makefiles at the start of each development cycle.  While that's not
much work, it's easily forgotten, so let's get rid of it by setting
the SO_MINOR_VERSION values directly from $(MAJORVERSION).

In the case of libpq, this dev cycle's value of SO_MINOR_VERSION happens
to be "10" anyway, so this switch is transparent.  For ecpg's shared
libraries, this will result in skipping one or two minor version numbers
between v9.6 and v10, which seems like no big problem; and it was a bit
inconsistent that they didn't have equal minor version numbers anyway.

Discussion: <21969.1471287988@sss.pgh.pa.us>
2016-08-16 13:58:54 -04:00
Tom Lane a7b5573d66 Remove separate version numbering for ecpg preprocessor.
Once upon a time, it made sense for the ecpg preprocessor to have its
own version number, because it used a manually-maintained grammar that
wasn't always in sync with the core grammar.  But those days are
thankfully long gone, leaving only a maintenance nuisance behind.
Let's use the PG v10 version numbering changeover as an excuse to get
rid of the ecpg version number and just have ecpg identify itself by
PG_VERSION.  From the user's standpoint, ecpg will go from "4.12" in
the 9.6 branch to "10" in the 10 branch, so there's no failure of
monotonicity.

Discussion: <1471332659.4410.67.camel@postgresql.org>
2016-08-16 12:49:30 -04:00
Robert Haas b25b6c9701 Once again allow LWLocks to be used within DSM segments.
Prior to commit 7882c3b0b9, it was
possible to use LWLocks within DSM segments, but that commit broke
this use case by switching from a doubly linked list to a circular
linked list.  Switch back, using a new bit of general infrastructure
for maintaining lists of PGPROCs.

Thomas Munro, reviewed by me.
2016-08-15 18:09:55 -04:00
Tom Lane 3149a12166 Update git_changelog to know that there's a 9.6 branch.
Missed this in the main 10devel version stamping patch.
2016-08-15 15:24:54 -04:00
Tom Lane 0b9358d440 Stamp shared-library minor version numbers for v10. 2016-08-15 14:35:55 -04:00
Tom Lane ca9112a424 Stamp HEAD as 10devel.
This is a good bit more complicated than the average new-version stamping
commit, because it includes various adjustments in pursuit of changing
from three-part to two-part version numbers.  It's likely some further
work will be needed around that change; but this is enough to get through
the regression tests, at least in Unix builds.

Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane
2016-08-15 13:49:49 -04:00
Tom Lane b5bce6c1ec Final pgindent + perltidy run for 9.6. 2016-08-15 13:42:51 -04:00
Tom Lane 05d8dec690 Simplify the process of perltidy'ing our Perl files.
Wrap the perltidy invocation into a shell script to reduce the risk of
copy-and-paste errors.  Include removal of *.bak files in the script,
so they don't accidentally get committed.  Improve the directions in
the README file.
2016-08-15 11:32:09 -04:00
Noah Misch fcd15f1358 Obstruct shell, SQL, and conninfo injection via database and role names.
Due to simplistic quoting and confusion of database names with conninfo
strings, roles with the CREATEDB or CREATEROLE option could escalate to
superuser privileges when a superuser next ran certain maintenance
commands.  The new coding rule for PQconnectdbParams() calls, documented
at conninfo_array_parse(), is to pass expand_dbname=true and wrap
literal database names in a trivial connection string.  Escape
zero-length values in appendConnStrVal().  Back-patch to 9.1 (all
supported versions).

Nathan Bossart, Michael Paquier, and Noah Misch.  Reviewed by Peter
Eisentraut.  Reported by Nathan Bossart.

Security: CVE-2016-5424
2016-08-08 10:07:46 -04:00
Tom Lane 18555b1323 Establish conventions about global object names used in regression tests.
To ensure that "make installcheck" can be used safely against an existing
installation, we need to be careful about what global object names
(database, role, and tablespace names) we use; otherwise we might
accidentally clobber important objects.  There's been a weak consensus that
test databases should have names including "regression", and that test role
names should start with "regress_", but we didn't have any particular rule
about tablespace names; and neither of the other rules was followed with
any consistency either.

This commit moves us a long way towards having a hard-and-fast rule that
regression test databases must have names including "regression", and that
test role and tablespace names must start with "regress_".  It's not
completely there because I did not touch some test cases in rolenames.sql
that test creation of special role names like "session_user".  That will
require some rethinking of exactly what we want to test, whereas the intent
of this patch is just to hit all the cases in which the needed renamings
are cosmetic.

There is no enforcement mechanism in this patch either, but if we don't
add one we can expect that the tests will soon be violating the convention
again.  Again, that's not such a cosmetic change and it will require
discussion.  (But I did use a quick-hack enforcement patch to find these
cases.)

Discussion: <16638.1468620817@sss.pgh.pa.us>
2016-07-17 18:42:43 -04:00
Tom Lane 30b2731bd2 Fix TAP tests and MSVC scripts for pathnames with spaces.
Change assorted places in our Perl code that did things like
	system("prog $path/file");
to do it more like
	system('prog', "$path/file");
which is safe against spaces and other special characters in the path
variable.  The latter was already the prevailing style, but a few bits
of code hadn't gotten this memo.  Back-patch to 9.4 as relevant.

Michael Paquier, Kyotaro Horiguchi

Discussion: <20160704.160213.111134711.horiguchi.kyotaro@lab.ntt.co.jp>
2016-07-09 16:47:38 -04:00
Tom Lane 63ae052367 Update oidjoins regression test for 9.6.
Looks like we had some more catalog drift recently.
2016-06-22 17:12:55 -04:00
Robert Haas e472ce9624 Add integrity-checking functions to pg_visibility.
The new pg_check_visible() and pg_check_frozen() functions can be used to
verify that the visibility map bits for a relation's data pages match the
actual state of the tuples on those pages.

Amit Kapila and Robert Haas, reviewed (in earlier versions) by Andres
Freund.  Additional testing help by Thomas Munro.
2016-06-15 14:33:58 -04:00
Noah Misch 3be0a62ffe Finish pgindent run for 9.6: Perl files. 2016-06-12 04:19:56 -04:00
Noah Misch b098abf905 Document the authoritative version of perltidy.
Every whole-tree perltidy run has used this version, firmly establishing
it as the de facto standard.
2016-06-12 04:19:44 -04:00
Robert Haas e7bcd983f5 Yet again update typedefs.list file in preparation for pgindent run
Because the run was delayed, the file had a chance to get out of date.
2016-06-09 12:16:17 -04:00
Greg Stark e1623c3959 Fix various common mispellings.
Mostly these are just comments but there are a few in documentation
and a handful in code and tests. Hopefully this doesn't cause too much
unnecessary pain for backpatching. I relented from some of the most
common like "thru" for that reason. The rest don't seem numerous
enough to cause problems.

Thanks to Kevin Lyda's tool https://pypi.python.org/pypi/misspellings
2016-06-03 16:08:45 +01:00
Peter Eisentraut 5251f2fc4d Update release instructions for translation updates
We don't tag the translations repository any more, because the commits
into postgresql contain the git hashes, and that's authoritative.
2016-05-13 21:21:47 -04:00
Stephen Frost 6e243c43c9 Add test_pg_dump to @contrib_excludes
The test_pg_dump extension doesn't have a C component, so we need
to exclude it from the MSVC build system trying to figure out how
to build it.

Also add a "MODULES" line to the Makefile, as test_extensions has.
Might not be necessary, but seems good to keep things consistent.

Lastly, remove the 'installcheck' line from test_pg_dump, as that
was causing redefinition errors, at least on my box.  This also
makes test_pg_dump consistent with how commit_ts is set up.
2016-05-06 16:39:56 -04:00
Robert Haas f2f5e7e78e Again update typedefs.list file in preparation for pgindent run
This time, use the buildfarm-supplied contents for this file, instead
of trying to update it by eyeballing the pgindent output.

Per discussion with Tom and Bruce.
2016-05-02 09:23:55 -04:00
Tom Lane 8473b7f95f Add a --non-master-only option to git_changelog.
This has the inverse effect of --master-only.  It's needed to help find
cases where a commit should not be described in major release notes
because it was back-patched into older branches, though not at the same
time as the HEAD commit.
2016-05-01 11:24:32 -04:00
Andrew Dunstan 0fb54de9aa Support building with Visual Studio 2015
Adjust the way we detect the locale. As a result the minumum Windows
version supported by VS2015 and later is Windows Vista. Add some tweaks
to remove new compiler warnings. Remove documentation references to the
now obsolete msysGit.

Michael Paquier, somewhat edited by me, reviewed by Christian Ullrich.

Backpatch to 9.5
2016-04-29 08:09:07 -04:00
Robert Haas acb51bd71d Update typedefs.list file in preparation for pgindent run
In addition to adding new typedefs, I also re-sorted the file so that
various entries add piecemeal, mostly or entirely by me, were alphabetized
the same way as other entries in the file.
2016-04-27 11:50:34 -04:00
Tom Lane 8067c8f86b Add a --brief option to git_changelog.
In commit c0b050192, Andres introduced the idea of including one-line
commit references in our major release notes.  Teach git_changelog to
emit a (lightly adapted) version of that format, so that we don't
have to laboriously add it to the notes after the fact.  The default
output isn't changed, since I anticipate still using that for minor
release notes.
2016-04-26 18:52:41 -04:00
Magnus Hagander cf086b1c2f Update helptext for vcregress.pl
This has clearly not been tracking the code changse for quite some time.

Michael Paquier, problem spotted by Kyotaro HORIGUCHI
2016-04-15 10:04:10 +02:00
Kevin Grittner 80647bf65a Make oldSnapshotControl a pointer to a volatile structure
It was incorrectly declared as a volatile pointer to a non-volatile
structure.  Eliminate the OldSnapshotControl struct definition; it
is really not needed.  Pointed out by Tom Lane.

While at it, add OldSnapshotControlData to pgindent's list of
structures.
2016-04-11 15:43:52 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut ee5dbc8173 cpluspluscheck: Update include path
Some things in src/include/fe_utils require libpq headers, so add
libpq's include path to the command line used here.
2016-04-11 11:16:16 -04:00
Andres Freund 48354581a4 Allow Pin/UnpinBuffer to operate in a lockfree manner.
Pinning/Unpinning a buffer is a very frequent operation; especially in
read-mostly cache resident workloads. Benchmarking shows that in various
scenarios the spinlock protecting a buffer header's state becomes a
significant bottleneck. The problem can be reproduced with pgbench -S on
larger machines, but can be considerably worse for queries which touch
the same buffers over and over at a high frequency (e.g. nested loops
over a small inner table).

To allow atomic operations to be used, cram BufferDesc's flags,
usage_count, buf_hdr_lock, refcount into a single 32bit atomic variable;
that allows to manipulate them together using 32bit compare-and-swap
operations. This requires reducing MAX_BACKENDS to 2^18-1 (which could
be lifted by using a 64bit field, but it's not a realistic configuration
atm).

As not all operations can easily implemented in a lockfree manner,
implement the previous buf_hdr_lock via a flag bit in the atomic
variable. That way we can continue to lock the header in places where
it's needed, but can get away without acquiring it in the more frequent
hot-paths.  There's some additional operations which can be done without
the lock, but aren't in this patch; but the most important places are
covered.

As bufmgr.c now essentially re-implements spinlocks, abstract the delay
logic from s_lock.c into something more generic. It now has already two
users, and more are coming up; there's a follupw patch for lwlock.c at
least.

This patch is based on a proof-of-concept written by me, which Alexander
Korotkov made into a fully working patch; the committed version is again
revised by me.  Benchmarking and testing has, amongst others, been
provided by Dilip Kumar, Alexander Korotkov, Robert Haas.

On a large x86 system improvements for readonly pgbench, with a high
client count, of a factor of 8 have been observed.

Author: Alexander Korotkov and Andres Freund
Discussion: 2400449.GjM57CE0Yg@dinodell
2016-04-10 20:12:32 -07:00
Kevin Grittner 279d86afdb Add snapshot_too_old to NSVC @contrib_excludes
The buildfarm showed failure for Windows MSVC builds due to this
omission.  This might not be the only problem with the Makefile for
this feature, but hopefully this will get it past the immediate
problem.

Fix suggested by Tom Lane
2016-04-08 17:22:21 -05:00
Andrew Dunstan 76a1c97bf2 Silence warning from modern perl about unescaped braces 2016-04-08 12:50:30 -04:00
Andrew Dunstan 01a07e6c11 Turn down MSVC compiler verbosity
Most of what is produced by the detailed verbosity level is of no
interest at all, so switch to the normal level for more usable output.

Christian Ullrich

Backpatch to all live branches
2016-04-08 12:37:20 -04:00
Fujii Masao 989be0810d Support multiple synchronous standby servers.
Previously synchronous replication offered only the ability to confirm
that all changes made by a transaction had been transferred to at most
one synchronous standby server.

This commit extends synchronous replication so that it supports multiple
synchronous standby servers. It enables users to consider one or more
standby servers as synchronous, and increase the level of transaction
durability by ensuring that transaction commits wait for replies from
all of those synchronous standbys.

Multiple synchronous standby servers are configured in
synchronous_standby_names which is extended to support new syntax of
'num_sync ( standby_name [ , ... ] )', where num_sync specifies
the number of synchronous standbys that transaction commits need to
wait for replies from and standby_name is the name of a standby
server.

The syntax of 'standby_name [ , ... ]' which was used in 9.5 or before
is also still supported. It's the same as new syntax with num_sync=1.

This commit doesn't include "quorum commit" feature which was discussed
in pgsql-hackers. Synchronous standbys are chosen based on their priorities.
synchronous_standby_names determines the priority of each standby for
being chosen as a synchronous standby. The standbys whose names appear
earlier in the list are given higher priority and will be considered as
synchronous. Other standby servers appearing later in this list
represent potential synchronous standbys.

The regression test for multiple synchronous standbys is not included
in this commit. It should come later.

Authors: Sawada Masahiko, Beena Emerson, Michael Paquier, Fujii Masao
Reviewed-By: Kyotaro Horiguchi, Amit Kapila, Robert Haas, Simon Riggs,
Amit Langote, Thomas Munro, Sameer Thakur, Suraj Kharage, Abhijit Menon-Sen,
Rajeev Rastogi

Many thanks to the various individuals who were involved in
discussing and developing this feature.
2016-04-06 17:18:25 +09:00
Alvaro Herrera f2fcad27d5 Support ALTER THING .. DEPENDS ON EXTENSION
This introduces a new dependency type which marks an object as depending
on an extension, such that if the extension is dropped, the object
automatically goes away; and also, if the database is dumped, the object
is included in the dump output.  Currently the grammar supports this for
indexes, triggers, materialized views and functions only, although the
utility code is generic so adding support for more object types is a
matter of touching the parser rules only.

Author: Abhijit Menon-Sen
Reviewed-by: Alexander Korotkov, Álvaro Herrera
Discussion: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20160115062649.GA5068@toroid.org
2016-04-05 18:38:54 -03:00
Noah Misch 4ad6f13500 Copyedit comments and documentation. 2016-04-01 21:53:10 -04:00
Magnus Hagander 3063e7a840 Add missing gss option to msvc config template
Michael Paquier
2016-03-30 10:49:44 +02:00
Tom Lane f5f15ea6aa Fix MSVC build for changes in zic.
zic now only needs zic.c, but I didn't realize knowledge about it was
hardwired into Mkvcbuild.pm.  Per buildfarm.
2016-03-28 16:02:07 -04:00
Tom Lane cd37bb7859 Improve PL/Tcl errorCode facility by providing decoded name for SQLSTATE.
We don't really want to encourage people to write numeric SQLSTATEs in
programs; that's unreadable and error-prone.  Copy plpgsql's infrastructure
for converting between SQLSTATEs and exception names shown in Appendix A,
and modify examples in tests and documentation to do it that way.
2016-03-25 16:54:52 -04:00
Tom Lane c1156411ad Move psql's psqlscan.l into src/fe_utils.
This completes (at least for now) the project of getting rid of ad-hoc
linkages among the src/bin/ subdirectories.  Everything they share is now
in src/fe_utils/ and is included from a static library at link time.

A side benefit is that we can restore the FLEX_NO_BACKUP check for
psqlscanslash.l.  We might need to think of another way to do that check
if we ever need to build two lexers with that property in the same source
directory, but there's no foreseeable reason to need that.
2016-03-24 20:28:47 -04:00
Tom Lane d65bea26a8 Move psql's print.c and mbprint.c into src/fe_utils.
Just turning the crank ...
2016-03-24 18:27:28 -04:00
Tom Lane 0ecd3fedfc Add missed inclusion requirement in Mkvcbuild.pm.
Per buildfarm.
2016-03-24 17:12:40 -04:00
Tom Lane 588d963b00 Create src/fe_utils/, and move stuff into there from pg_dump's dumputils.
Per discussion, we want to create a static library and put the stuff into
it that until now has been shared across src/bin/ directories by ad-hoc
methods like symlinking a source file.  This commit creates the library and
populates it with a couple of files that contain the widely-useful portions
of pg_dump's dumputils.c file.  dumputils.c survives, because it has some
stuff that didn't seem appropriate for fe_utils, but it's significantly
smaller and is no longer referenced from any other directory.

Follow-on patches will move more stuff into fe_utils.

The Mkvcbuild.pm hacking here is just a best guess; we'll see how the
buildfarm likes it.
2016-03-24 15:55:57 -04:00
Tom Lane 2c6af4f442 Move keywords.c/kwlookup.c into src/common/.
Now that we have src/common/ for code shared between frontend and backend,
we can get rid of (most of) the klugy ways that the keyword table and
keyword lookup code were formerly shared between different uses.
This is a first step towards a more general plan of getting rid of
special-purpose kluges for sharing code in src/bin/.

I chose to merge kwlookup.c back into keywords.c, as it once was, and
always has been so far as keywords.h is concerned.  We could have
kept them separate, but there is noplace that uses ScanKeywordLookup
without also wanting access to the backend's keyword list, so there
seems little point.

ecpg is still a bit weird, but at least now the trickiness is documented.

I think that the MSVC build script should require no adjustments beyond
what's done here ... but we'll soon find out.
2016-03-23 20:22:08 -04:00
Andres Freund 98a64d0bd7 Introduce WaitEventSet API.
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.com
20160114143931.GG10941@awork2.anarazel.de
2016-03-21 12:22:54 +01:00
Andres Freund 72e2d21c12 Combine win32 and unix latch implementations.
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
2016-03-21 11:03:26 +01:00
Andres Freund 326d73c86f Second attempt at fixing MSVC build for 68ab8e8ba4.
After the previous fix in 6f1f34c9 msvc ended up looking for psqlscan.c
in the wrong directory.

David's fix just forces the path to be adjusted. That's not a
particularly pretty fix, but it hopefully will make the buildfarm green
again.

Author: David Rowley
Discussion: CAKJS1f_9CCi_t+LEgV5GWoCj3wjavcMoDc5qfcf_A0UwpQoPoA@mail.gmail.com
2016-03-21 10:49:45 +01:00
Tom Lane 6f1f34c92b Best-guess attempt at fixing MSVC build for 68ab8e8ba4.
pgbench now needs to use src/bin/psql/psqlscan.l, but it's not very clear
how to fit that into the MSVC build system.  If this doesn't work I'm going
to need some help from somebody who actually understands those scripts ...
2016-03-20 17:51:54 -04:00
Andrew Dunstan 5d03201056 Remove dependency on psed for MSVC builds.
Modern Perl has removed psed from its core distribution, so it might not
be readily available on some build platforms. We therefore replace its
use with a Perl script generated by s2p, which is equivalent to the sed
script. The latter is retained for non-MSVC builds to avoid creating a
new hard dependency on Perl for non-Windows tarball builds.

Backpatch to all live branches.

Michael Paquier and me.
2016-03-19 18:36:35 -04:00
Tom Lane 0ea9efbe9e Split psql's lexer into two separate .l files for SQL and backslash cases.
This gets us to a point where psqlscan.l can be used by other frontend
programs for the same purpose psql uses it for, ie to detect when it's
collected a complete SQL command from input that is divided across
line boundaries.  Moreover, other programs can supply their own lexers
for backslash commands of their own choosing.  A follow-on patch will
use this in pgbench.

The end result here is roughly the same as in Kyotaro Horiguchi's
0001-Make-SQL-parser-part-of-psqlscan-independent-from-ps.patch, although
the details of the method for switching between lexers are quite different.
Basically, in this patch we share the entire PsqlScanState, YY_BUFFER_STATE
stack, *and* yyscan_t between different lexers.  The only thing we need
to do to switch to a different lexer is to make sure the start_state is
valid for the new lexer.  This works because flex doesn't keep any other
persistent state that depends on the specific lexing tables generated for
a particular .l file.  (We are assuming that both lexers are built with
the same flex version, or at least versions that are compatible with
respect to the contents of yyscan_t; but that doesn't seem likely to
be a big problem in practice, considering how slowly flex changes.)

Aside from being more efficient than Horiguchi-san's original solution,
this avoids possible corner-case changes in semantics: the original code
was capable of popping the input buffer stack while still staying in
backslash-related parsing states.  I'm not sure that that equates to any
useful user-visible behaviors, but I'm not sure it doesn't either, so
I'm loath to assume that we only need to consider the topmost buffer when
parsing a backslash command.

I've attempted to update the MSVC build scripts for the added .l file,
but will rely on the buildfarm to see if I missed anything.

Kyotaro Horiguchi and Tom Lane
2016-03-19 00:24:55 -04:00
Andres Freund 9cd00c457e Checkpoint sorting and balancing.
Up to now checkpoints were written in the order they're in the
BufferDescriptors. That's nearly random in a lot of cases, which
performs badly on rotating media, but even on SSDs it causes slowdowns.

To avoid that, sort checkpoints before writing them out. We currently
sort by tablespace, relfilenode, fork and block number.

One of the major reasons that previously wasn't done, was fear of
imbalance between tablespaces. To address that balance writes between
tablespaces.

The other prime concern was that the relatively large allocation to sort
the buffers in might fail, preventing checkpoints from happening. Thus
pre-allocate the required memory in shared memory, at server startup.

This particularly makes it more efficient to have checkpoint flushing
enabled, because that'll often result in a lot of writes that can be
coalesced into one flush.

Discussion: alpine.DEB.2.10.1506011320000.28433@sto
Author: Fabien Coelho and Andres Freund
2016-03-10 17:05:09 -08:00
Andres Freund 428b1d6b29 Allow to trigger kernel writeback after a configurable number of writes.
Currently writes to the main data files of postgres all go through the
OS page cache. This means that some operating systems can end up
collecting a large number of dirty buffers in their respective page
caches.  When these dirty buffers are flushed to storage rapidly, be it
because of fsync(), timeouts, or dirty ratios, latency for other reads
and writes can increase massively.  This is the primary reason for
regular massive stalls observed in real world scenarios and artificial
benchmarks; on rotating disks stalls on the order of hundreds of seconds
have been observed.

On linux it is possible to control this by reducing the global dirty
limits significantly, reducing the above problem. But global
configuration is rather problematic because it'll affect other
applications; also PostgreSQL itself doesn't always generally want this
behavior, e.g. for temporary files it's undesirable.

Several operating systems allow some control over the kernel page
cache. Linux has sync_file_range(2), several posix systems have msync(2)
and posix_fadvise(2). sync_file_range(2) is preferable because it
requires no special setup, whereas msync() requires the to-be-flushed
range to be mmap'ed. For the purpose of flushing dirty data
posix_fadvise(2) is the worst alternative, as flushing dirty data is
just a side-effect of POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED, which also removes the pages
from the page cache.  Thus the feature is enabled by default only on
linux, but can be enabled on all systems that have any of the above
APIs.

While desirable and likely possible this patch does not contain an
implementation for windows.

With the infrastructure added, writes made via checkpointer, bgwriter
and normal user backends can be flushed after a configurable number of
writes. Each of these sources of writes controlled by a separate GUC,
checkpointer_flush_after, bgwriter_flush_after and backend_flush_after
respectively; they're separate because the number of flushes that are
good are separate, and because the performance considerations of
controlled flushing for each of these are different.

A later patch will add checkpoint sorting - after that flushes from the
ckeckpoint will almost always be desirable. Bgwriter flushes are most of
the time going to be random, which are slow on lots of storage hardware.
Flushing in backends works well if the storage and bgwriter can keep up,
but if not it can have negative consequences.  This patch is likely to
have negative performance consequences without checkpoint sorting, but
unfortunately so has sorting without flush control.

Discussion: alpine.DEB.2.10.1506011320000.28433@sto
Author: Fabien Coelho and Andres Freund
2016-03-10 17:04:34 -08:00