This patch modifies the walwriter process so that, when it has not found
anything useful to do for many consecutive wakeup cycles, it extends its
sleep time to reduce the server's idle power consumption. It reverts to
normal as soon as it's done any successful flushes. It's still true that
during any async commit, backends check for completed, unflushed pages of
WAL and signal the walwriter if there are any; so that in practice the
walwriter can get awakened and returned to normal operation sooner than the
sleep time might suggest.
Also, improve the checkpointer so that it uses a latch and a computed delay
time to not wake up at all except when it has something to do, replacing a
previous hardcoded 0.5 sec wakeup cycle. This also is primarily useful for
reducing the server's power consumption when idle.
In passing, get rid of the dedicated latch for signaling the walwriter in
favor of using its procLatch, since that comports better with possible
generic signal handlers using that latch. Also, fix a pre-existing bug
with failure to save/restore errno in walwriter's signal handlers.
Peter Geoghegan, somewhat simplified by Tom
Commit 62c7bd31c8 had assorted problems, most
visibly that it broke PREPARE TRANSACTION in the presence of session-level
advisory locks (which should be ignored by PREPARE), as per a recent
complaint from Stephen Rees. More abstractly, the patch made the
LockMethodData.transactional flag not merely useless but outright
dangerous, because in point of fact that flag no longer tells you anything
at all about whether a lock is held transactionally. This fix therefore
removes that flag altogether. We now rely entirely on the convention
already in use in lock.c that transactional lock holds must be owned by
some ResourceOwner, while session holds are never so owned. Setting the
locallock struct's owner link to NULL thus denotes a session hold, and
there is no redundant marker for that.
PREPARE TRANSACTION now works again when there are session-level advisory
locks, and it is also able to transfer transactional advisory locks to the
prepared transaction, but for implementation reasons it throws an error if
we hold both types of lock on a single lockable object. Perhaps it will be
worth improving that someday.
Assorted other minor cleanup and documentation editing, as well.
Back-patch to 9.1, except that in the 9.1 branch I did not remove the
LockMethodData.transactional flag for fear of causing an ABI break for
any external code that might be examining those structs.
The previous code could cause a backend crash after BEGIN; SAVEPOINT a;
LOCK TABLE foo (interrupted by ^C or statement timeout); ROLLBACK TO
SAVEPOINT a; LOCK TABLE foo, and might have leaked strong-lock counts
in other situations.
Report by Zoltán Böszörményi; patch review by Jeff Davis.
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.
Postmaster sets max_safe_fds by testing how many open file descriptors it
can open, and that is normally inherited by all child processes at fork().
Not so on EXEC_BACKEND, ie. Windows, however. Because of that, we
effectively ignored max_files_per_process on Windows, and always assumed
a conservative default of 32 simultaneous open files. That could have an
impact on performance, if you need to access a lot of different files
in a query. After this patch, the value is passed to child processes by
save/restore_backend_variables() among many other global variables.
It has been like this forever, but given the lack of complaints about it,
I'm not backpatching this.
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.
For those variables only used when asserts are enabled, use a new
macro PG_USED_FOR_ASSERTS_ONLY, which expands to
__attribute__((unused)) when asserts are not enabled.
This allows loadable modules to get control at drop time, perhaps for the
purpose of performing additional security checks or to log the event.
The initial purpose of this code is to support sepgsql, but other
applications should be possible as well.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by me.
A prepared transaction can get new conflicts in and out after preparing, so
we cannot rely on the in- and out-flags stored in the statefile at prepare-
time. As a quick fix, make the conservative assumption that after a restart,
all prepared transactions are considered to have both in- and out-conflicts.
That can lead to unnecessary rollbacks after a crash, but that shouldn't be
a big problem in practice; you don't want prepared transactions to hang
around for a long time anyway.
Dan Ports
If LWLockWaitUntilFree was called before the first LWLockAcquire call, you
would either crash because of access to uninitialized array or account the
acquisition incorrectly. LWLockConditionalAcquire doesn't have this problem
because it doesn't update the lwlock stats.
In practice, this never happens because there is no codepath where you would
call LWLockWaitUntilfree before LWLockAcquire after a new process is
launched. But that's just accidental, there's no guarantee that that's
always going to be true in the future.
Spotted by Jeff Janes.
Originally, most of this code assumed that no Postgres backends could be
running concurrently with it, and so no locking could be needed. That
assumption fails in Hot Standby. While it's still true that Hot Standby
backends should never change values like nextXid, they can examine them,
and consistency is important in some cases such as when computing a
snapshot. Therefore, prudence requires that WAL replay code obtain the
relevant locks when modifying such variables, even though it can examine
them without taking a lock. We were following that coding rule in some
places but not all. This commit applies the coding rule uniformly to all
updates of ShmemVariableCache and MultiXactState fields; a search of the
replay routines did not find any other cases that seemed to be at risk.
In addition, this commit fixes a longstanding thinko in replay of NEXTOID
and checkpoint records: we tried to advance nextOid only if it was behind
the value in the WAL record, but the comparison would draw the wrong
conclusion if OID wraparound had occurred since the previous value.
Better to just unconditionally assign the new value, since OID assignment
shouldn't be happening during replay anyway.
The additional locking seems to be more in the nature of future-proofing
than fixing any live bug, so I am not going to back-patch it. The NEXTOID
fix will be back-patched separately.
All other WAL redo routines either call RestoreBkpBlocks() or Assert that
they haven't been passed any backup blocks. Make this one do likewise.
Also, fix incorrect routine name in its failure message.
If there was a wait-until-free process in the head of the wait queue,
followed by an exclusive locker, the exclusive locker was not be woken up
as it should.
When a backend needs to flush the WAL, and someone else is already flushing
the WAL, wait until it releases the WALInsertLock and check if we still need
to do the flush or if the other backend already did the work for us, before
acquiring WALInsertLock. This helps group commit, because when the WAL flush
finishes, all the backends that were waiting for it can be woken up in one
go, and the can all concurrently observe that they're done, rather than
waking them up one by one in a cascading fashion.
This is based on a new LWLock function, LWLockWaitUntilFree(), which has
peculiar semantics. If the lock is immediately free, it grabs the lock and
returns true. If it's not free, it waits until it is released, but then
returns false without grabbing the lock. This is used in XLogFlush(), so
that when the lock is acquired, the backend flushes the WAL, but if it's
not, the backend first checks the current flush location before retrying.
Original patch and benchmarking by Peter Geoghegan and Simon Riggs, although
this patch as committed ended up being very different from that.
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.
This doesn't do anything useful just yet, but is intended as supporting
infrastructure for allowing sepgsql to sensibly check DROP permissions.
KaiGai Kohei and Robert Haas
Add counters for number and size of temporary files used
for spill-to-disk queries for each database to the
pg_stat_database view.
Tomas Vondra, review by Magnus Hagander
We log AccessExclusiveLocks for replay onto standby nodes,
but because of timing issues on ProcArray it is possible to
log a lock that is still held by a just committed transaction
that is very soon to be removed. To avoid any timing issue we
avoid applying locks made by transactions with InvalidXid.
Simon Riggs, bug report Tom Lane, diagnosis Pavan Deolasee
When the only remaining active transactions are READ ONLY, we do a "partial
cleanup" of committed transactions because certain types of conflicts
aren't possible anymore. For committed r/w transactions, we release the
SIREAD locks but keep the SERIALIZABLEXACT. However, for committed r/o
transactions, we can go further and release the SERIALIZABLEXACT too. The
problem was with the latter case: we were returning the SERIALIZABLEXACT to
the free list without removing it from the finished list.
The only real change in the patch is the SHMQueueDelete line, but I also
reworked some of the surrounding code to make it obvious that r/o and r/w
transactions are handled differently -- the existing code felt a bit too
clever.
Dan Ports
Previously, this was hardcoded: we always had 8. Performance testing
shows that isn't enough, especially on big SMP systems, so we allow it
to scale up as high as 32 when there's adequate memory. On the flip
side, when shared_buffers is very small, drop the number of CLOG buffers
down to as little as 4, so that we can start the postmaster even
when very little shared memory is available.
Per extensive discussion with Simon Riggs, Tom Lane, and others on
pgsql-hackers.
As noted by Heikki Linnakangas, the previous coding confused the "flags"
variable with the "mask" variable. The affect of this appears to be that
unlogged buffers would get written out at every checkpoint rather than
only at shutdown time. Although that's arguably an acceptable failure
mode, I'm back-patching this change, since it seems like a poor idea to
rely on this happening to work.
All supported platforms support the C89 standard function atexit()
(SunOS 4 probably being the last one not to), and supporting both
makes the code clumsy.
smgrdounlink takes care to not throw an ERROR if it fails to unlink
something, but that caution was rendered useless by commit
3396000684, which put an smgrexists call in
front of it; smgrexists *does* throw error if anything looks funny, such
as getting a permissions error from trying to open the file. If that
happens post-commit, you get a PANIC, and what's worse the same logic
appears in the WAL replay code, so the database even fails to restart.
Restore the intended behavior by removing the smgrexists call --- it isn't
accomplishing anything that we can't do better by adjusting mdunlink's
ideas of whether it ought to warn about ENOENT or not.
Per report from Joseph Shraibman of unrecoverable crash after trying to
drop a table whose FSM fork had somehow gotten chmod'd to 000 permissions.
Backpatch to 8.4, where the bogus coding was introduced.
Heikki Linnakangas had the idea of rearranging GetSnapshotData to
avoid checking for sub-XIDs when no top-level XID is present. This
patch does that plus further a bit of further, related rearrangement.
Benchmarking show a significant improvement on unlogged tables at
higher concurrency levels, and mostly indifferent result on permanent
tables (which are presumably bottlenecked elsewhere). Most of the
benefit seems to come from using the new NormalTransactionIdPrecedes()
macro rather than the function call TransactionIdPrecedes().
This adds some I/O stats to the logging of autovacuum (when the
operation takes long enough that log_autovacuum_min_duration causes it
to be logged), so that it is easier to tune. Notably, it adds buffer
I/O counts (hits, misses, dirtied) and read and write rate.
Authors: Greg Smith and Noah Misch
This speeds up snapshot-taking and reduces ProcArrayLock contention.
Also, the PGPROC (and PGXACT) structures used by two-phase commit are
now allocated as part of the main array, rather than in a separate
array, and we keep ProcArray sorted in pointer order. These changes
are intended to minimize the number of cache lines that must be pulled
in to take a snapshot, and testing shows a substantial increase in
performance on both read and write workloads at high concurrencies.
Pavan Deolasee, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
When the system is idle for awhile after activity, the "smoothed_alloc"
state variable in BgBufferSync converges slowly to zero. With standard
IEEE float arithmetic this results in several iterations with denormalized
values, which causes kernel traps and annoying log messages on some
poorly-designed platforms. There's no real need to track such small values
of smoothed_alloc, so we can prevent the kernel traps by forcing it to zero
as soon as it's too small to be interesting for our purposes. This issue
is purely cosmetic, since the iterations don't happen fast enough for the
kernel traps to pose any meaningful performance problem, but still it seems
worth shutting up the log messages.
The kernel log messages were previously reported by a number of people,
but kudos to Greg Matthews for tracking down exactly where they were coming
from.
This reverts commit 0180bd6180.
contrib/userlock is gone, but user-level locking still exists,
and is exposed via the pg_advisory* family of functions.
There was a timing window between when oldestActiveXid was derived
and when it should have been derived that only shows itself under
heavy load. Move code around to ensure correct timing of derivation.
No change to StartupSUBTRANS() code, which is where this failed.
Bug report by Chris Redekop
If the initial snapshot had overflowed then we can start whenever
the latest snapshot is empty, not overflowed or as we did already,
start when the xmin on primary was higher than xmax of our starting
snapshot, which proves we have full snapshot data.
Bug report by Chris Redekop
In assert-enabled builds, we assert during the shutdown sequence that
the queues have been properly emptied, and during process startup that
we are inheriting empty queues. In non-assert enabled builds, we just
save a few cycles.
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
We need not wait until the commit record is durably on disk, because
in the event of a crash the page we're updating with hint bits will
be gone anyway. Per off-list report from Heikki Linnakangas, this
can significantly degrade the performance of unlogged tables; I was
able to show a 2x speedup from this patch on a pgbench run with scale
factor 15. In practice, this will mostly help small, heavily updated
tables, because on larger tables you're unlikely to run into the same
row again before the commit record makes it out to disk.
Simon Riggs
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Heikki Linnakangas
Peter Eisentraut
Magnus Hagander
Bruce Momjian
Alvaro Herrera