To make it wake up promptly when activity starts again, backends nudge it
by setting a latch in MarkBufferDirty(). The latch is kept set while
bgwriter is active, so there is very little overhead from that when the
system is busy. It is only armed before going into longer sleep.
Peter Geoghegan, with some changes by me.
bgwriter is now a much less important process, responsible for page
cleaning duties only. checkpointer is now responsible for checkpoints
and so has a key role in shutdown. Later patches will correct doc
references to the now old idea that bgwriter performs checkpoints.
Has beneficial effect on performance at high write rates, but mainly
refactoring to more easily allow changes for power reduction by
simplifying previously tortuous code around required to allow page
cleaning and checkpointing to time slice in the same process.
Patch by me, Review by Dickson Guedes
walsender.h should depend on xlog.h, not vice versa. (Actually, the
inclusion was circular until a couple hours ago, which was even sillier;
but Bruce broke it in the expedient rather than logically correct
direction.) Because of that poor decision, plus blind application of
pgrminclude, we had a situation where half the system was depending on
xlog.h to include such unrelated stuff as array.h and guc.h. Clean up
the header inclusion, and manually revert a lot of what pgrminclude had
done so things build again.
This episode reinforces my feeling that pgrminclude should not be run
without adult supervision. Inclusion changes in header files in particular
need to be reviewed with great care. More generally, it'd be good if we
had a clearer notion of module layering to dictate which headers can sanely
include which others ... but that's a big task for another day.
detect postmaster death. Postmaster keeps the write-end of the pipe open,
so when it dies, children get EOF in the read-end. That can conveniently
be waited for in select(), which allows eliminating some of the polling
loops that check for postmaster death. This patch doesn't yet change all
the loops to use the new mechanism, expect a follow-on patch to do that.
This changes the interface to WaitLatch, so that it takes as argument a
bitmask of events that it waits for. Possible events are latch set, timeout,
postmaster death, and socket becoming readable or writeable.
The pipe method behaves slightly differently from the kill() method
previously used in PostmasterIsAlive() in the case that postmaster has died,
but its parent has not yet read its exit code with waitpid(). The pipe
returns EOF as soon as the process dies, but kill() continues to return
true until waitpid() has been called (IOW while the process is a zombie).
Because of that, change PostmasterIsAlive() to use the pipe too, otherwise
WaitLatch() would return immediately with WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH, while
PostmasterIsAlive() would claim it's still alive. That could easily lead to
busy-waiting while postmaster is in zombie state.
Peter Geoghegan with further changes by me, reviewed by Fujii Masao and
Florian Pflug.
This is advantageous because the BG writer is alive until much later in
the shutdown sequence than WAL writer; we want to make sure that it's
possible to shut off synchronous replication during a smart shutdown,
else it might not be possible to complete the shutdown at all.
Per very reasonable gripes from Fujii Masao and Simon Riggs.
When we need to insert a new entry and the queue is full, compact the
entire queue in the hopes of making room for the new entry. Doing this
on every insertion might worsen contention on BgWriterCommLock, but
when the queue it's full, it's far better than allowing the backend to
perform its own fsync, per testing by Greg Smith as reported in
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-01/msg02665.php
Original idea from Greg Smith. Patch by me. Review by Chris Browne
and Greg Smith
This new field counts the number of times that a backend which writes a
buffer out to the OS must also fsync() it. This happens when the
bgwriter fsync request queue is full, and is generally detrimental to
performance, so it's good to know when it's happening. Along the way,
log a new message at level DEBUG1 whenever we fail to hand off an fsync,
so that the problem can also be seen in examination of log files
(if the logging level is cranked up high enough).
Greg Smith, with minor tweaks by me.
This allows us to reliably remove all leftover temporary relation
files on cluster startup without reference to system catalogs or WAL;
therefore, we no longer include temporary relations in XLOG_XACT_COMMIT
and XLOG_XACT_ABORT WAL records.
Since these changes require including a backend ID in each
SharedInvalSmgrMsg, the size of the SharedInvalidationMessage.id
field has been reduced from two bytes to one, and the maximum number
of connections has been reduced from INT_MAX / 4 to 2^23-1. It would
be possible to remove these restrictions by increasing the size of
SharedInvalidationMessage by 4 bytes, but right now that doesn't seem
like a good trade-off.
Review by Jaime Casanova and Tom Lane.
rather than returning NULL for some-but-not-all failures as they used to.
Remove now-redundant tests for NULL from call sites.
We had to do something about this because many call sites were failing to
check for NULL; and changing it like this seems a lot more useful and
mistake-proof than adding checks to the call sites without them.
This includes two new kinds of postmaster processes, walsenders and
walreceiver. Walreceiver is responsible for connecting to the primary server
and streaming WAL to disk, while walsender runs in the primary server and
streams WAL from disk to the client.
Documentation still needs work, but the basics are there. We will probably
pull the replication section to a new chapter later on, as well as the
sections describing file-based replication. But let's do that as a separate
patch, so that it's easier to see what has been added/changed. This patch
also adds a new section to the chapter about FE/BE protocol, documenting the
protocol used by walsender/walreceivxer.
Bump catalog version because of two new functions,
pg_last_xlog_receive_location() and pg_last_xlog_replay_location(), for
monitoring the progress of replication.
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me
This patch gets us out from under the Unix limitation of two user-defined
signal types. We already had done something similar for signals directed to
the postmaster process; this adds multiplexing for signals directed to
backends and auxiliary processes (so long as they're connected to shared
memory).
As proof of concept, replace the former usage of SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2
for backends with use of the multiplexing mechanism. There are still some
hard-wired definitions of SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for other process types,
but getting rid of those doesn't seem interesting at the moment.
Fujii Masao
archive recovery. Invent a separate state variable and inquiry function
for XLogInsertAllowed() to clarify some tests and make the management of
writing the end-of-recovery checkpoint less klugy. Fix several places
that were incorrectly testing InRecovery when they should be looking at
RecoveryInProgress or XLogInsertAllowed (because they will now be executed
in the bgwriter not startup process). Clarify handling of bad LSNs passed
to XLogFlush during recovery. Use a spinlock for setting/testing
SharedRecoveryInProgress. Improve quite a lot of comments.
Heikki and Tom
during it:
When bgwriter is active, the startup process can't perform mdsync() correctly
because it won't see the fsync requests accumulated in bgwriter's private
pendingOpsTable. Therefore make bgwriter responsible for the end-of-recovery
checkpoint as well, when it's active.
When bgwriter is active (= archive recovery), the startup process must not
accumulate fsync requests to its own pendingOpsTable, since bgwriter won't
see them there when it performs restartpoints. Make startup process drop its
pendingOpsTable when bgwriter is launched to avoid that.
Update minimum recovery point one last time when leaving archive recovery.
It won't be updated by the end-of-recovery checkpoint because XLogFlush()
sees us as out of recovery already.
This fixes bug #4879 reported by Fujii Masao.
by extending the ereport() API to cater for pluralization directly. This
is better than the original method of calling ngettext outside the elog.c
code because (1) it avoids double translation, which wastes cycles and in
the worst case could give a wrong result; and (2) it avoids having to use
a different coding method in PL code than in the core backend. The
client-side uses of ngettext are not touched since neither of these concerns
is very pressing in the client environment. Per my proposal of yesterday.
copies?) to ensure they really don't run proc_exit/shmem_exit callbacks,
as was intended. I broke this behavior recently by installing atexit
callbacks without thinking about the one case where we truly don't want
to run those callback functions. Noted in an example from Dave Page.
In the backend, I changed only a handful of exemplary or important-looking
instances to make use of the plural support; there is probably more work
there. For the rest of the source, this should cover all relevant cases.
its usual buffer cleaning duties during archive recovery, and it's responsible
for performing restartpoints.
This requires some changes in postmaster. When the startup process has done
all the initialization and is ready to start WAL redo, it signals the
postmaster to launch the background writer. The postmaster is signaled again
when the point in recovery is reached where we know that the database is in
consistent state. Postmaster isn't interested in that at the moment, but
that's the point where we could let other backends in to perform read-only
queries. The postmaster is signaled third time when the recovery has ended,
so that postmaster knows that it's safe to start accepting connections.
The startup process now traps SIGTERM, and performs a "clean" shutdown. If
you do a fast shutdown during recovery, a shutdown restartpoint is performed,
like a shutdown checkpoint, and postmaster kills the processes cleanly. You
still have to continue the recovery at next startup, though.
Currently, the background writer is only launched during archive recovery.
We could launch it during crash recovery as well, but it seems better to keep
that codepath as simple as possible, for the sake of robustness. And it
couldn't do any restartpoints during crash recovery anyway, so it wouldn't be
that useful.
log_restartpoints is gone. Use log_checkpoints instead. This is yet to be
documented.
This whole operation is a pre-requisite for Hot Standby, but has some value of
its own whether the hot standby patch makes 8.4 or not.
Simon Riggs, with lots of modifications by me.
the bgwriter immediately. This covers the case where the bgwriter is still
starting up, as seen in a recent buildfarm failure. In future it might also
assist with clean recovery after a bgwriter termination and restart ---
right now the postmaster treats early bgwriter exit as a system crash,
but that might not always be so.
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.
of multiple forks, and each fork can be created and grown separately.
The bulk of this patch is about changing the smgr API to include an extra
ForkNumber argument in every smgr function. Also, smgrscheduleunlink and
smgrdounlink no longer implicitly call smgrclose, because other forks might
still exist after unlinking one. The callers of those functions have been
modified to call smgrclose instead.
This patch in itself doesn't have any user-visible effect, but provides the
infrastructure needed for upcoming patches. The additional forks envisioned
are a rewritten FSM implementation that doesn't rely on a fixed-size shared
memory block, and a visibility map to allow skipping portions of a table in
VACUUM that have no dead tuples.
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.
data structures and backend internal APIs. This solves problems we've seen
recently with inconsistent layout of pg_control between machines that have
32-bit time_t and those that have already migrated to 64-bit time_t. Also,
we can get out from under the problem that Windows' Unix-API emulation is not
consistent about the width of time_t.
There are a few remaining places where local time_t variables are used to hold
the current or recent result of time(NULL). I didn't bother changing these
since they do not affect any cross-module APIs and surely all platforms will
have 64-bit time_t before overflow becomes an actual risk. time_t should
be avoided for anything visible to extension modules, however.
buffers that cannot possibly need to be cleaned, and estimates how many
buffers it should try to clean based on moving averages of recent allocation
requests and density of reusable buffers. The patch also adds a couple
more columns to pg_stat_bgwriter to help measure the effectiveness of the
bgwriter.
Greg Smith, building on his own work and ideas from several other people,
in particular a much older patch from Itagaki Takahiro.
we'd dump core anyway immediately afterward if it were null; and it
seems to confuse some versions of icc into generating bad code.
Per report from Sergey Koposov. Patched in HEAD only, for the moment,
since this is only likely to affect developers.
recover from elog(ERROR). Problem was created by introduction of hash seq
search tracking awhile back, and affects all branches that have bgwriter;
in HEAD the disease has snuck into autovacuum and walwriter too. (Not sure
that the latter two use hash_seq_search at the moment, but surely they might
someday.) Per report from Sergey Koposov.
checkpoint. The comment claimed that we could do this anytime after
setting the checkpoint REDO point, but actually BufferSync is relying
on the assumption that buffers dumped by other backends will be fsync'd
too. So we really could not do it any sooner than we are doing it.
over a fairly long period of time, rather than being spat out in a burst.
This happens only for background checkpoints carried out by the bgwriter;
other cases, such as a shutdown checkpoint, are still done at full speed.
Remove the "all buffers" scan in the bgwriter, and associated stats
infrastructure, since this seems no longer very useful when the checkpoint
itself is properly throttled.
Original patch by Itagaki Takahiro, reworked by Heikki Linnakangas,
and some minor API editorialization by me.
and aborted transactions have different effects; also teach it not to assume
that prepared transactions are always committed.
Along the way, simplify the pgstats API by tying counting directly to
Relations; I cannot detect any redeeming social value in having stats
pointers in HeapScanDesc and IndexScanDesc structures. And fix a few
corner cases in which counts might be missed because the relation's
pgstat_info pointer hadn't been set.
is deleted. A backend about to unlink a file now sends a "revoke fsync"
request to the bgwriter to make it clean out pending fsync requests. There
is still a race condition where the bgwriter may try to fsync after the unlink
has happened, but we can resolve that by rechecking the fsync request queue
to see if a revoke request arrived meanwhile. This eliminates the former
kluge of "just assuming" that an ENOENT failure is okay, and lets us handle
the fact that on Windows it might be EACCES too without introducing any
questionable assumptions. After an idea of mine improved by Magnus.
The HEAD patch doesn't apply cleanly to 8.2, but I'll see about a back-port
later. In the meantime this could do with some testing on Windows; I've been
able to force it through the code path via ENOENT, but that doesn't prove that
it actually fixes the Windows problem ...
Heikki Linnakangas
Bruce Momjian
Simon Riggs
Tom Lane
Peter Eisentraut
Robert Haas
Magnus Hagander
Alvaro Herrera