the standby has written, flushed, and applied the WAL. At the moment, this
is for informational purposes only, the values are only shown in
pg_stat_replication system view, but in the future they will also be needed
for synchronous replication.
Extracted from Simon riggs' synchronous replication patch by Robert Haas, with
some tweaking by me.
Waiting for relation locks can lead to starvation - it pins down an
autovacuum worker for as long as the lock is held. But if we're doing
an anti-wraparound vacuum, then we still wait; maintenance can no longer
be put off.
To assist with troubleshooting, if log_autovacuum_min_duration >= 0,
we log whenever an autovacuum or autoanalyze is skipped for this reason.
Per a gripe by Josh Berkus, and ensuing discussion.
Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.
To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.
A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.
Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.
We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
Prior to 9.0, restartpoints never created, deleted, or recycled WAL
files, but now they can. This code makes log_checkpoints treat
checkpoints and restartpoints symmetrically. It also adjusts up
the documentation of the parameter to mention restartpoints.
Fujii Masao. Docs by me, as suggested by Itagaki Takahiro.
This tool makes it possible to do the pg_start_backup/
copy files/pg_stop_backup step in a single command.
There are still some steps to be done before this is a
complete backup solution, such as the ability to stream
the required WAL logs, but it's still usable, and
could do with some buildfarm coverage.
In passing, make the checkpoint request optionally
fast instead of hardcoding it.
Magnus Hagander, reviewed by Fujii Masao and Dimitri Fontaine
If wal_buffers is initially set to -1 (which is now the default), it's
replaced by 1/32nd of shared_buffers, with a minimum of 8 (the old default)
and a maximum of the XLOG segment size. The allowed range for manual
settings is still from 4 up to whatever will fit in shared memory.
Greg Smith, with implementation correction by me.
Recent versions of the Linux system header files cause xlogdefs.h to
believe that open_datasync should be the default sync method, whereas
formerly fdatasync was the default on Linux. open_datasync is a bad
choice, first because it doesn't actually outperform fdatasync (in fact
the reverse), and second because we try to use O_DIRECT with it, causing
failures on certain filesystems (e.g., ext4 with data=journal option).
This part of the patch is largely per a proposal from Marti Raudsepp.
More extensive changes are likely to follow in HEAD, but this is as much
change as we want to back-patch.
Also clean up confusing code and incorrect documentation surrounding the
fsync_writethrough option. Those changes shouldn't result in any actual
behavioral change, but I chose to back-patch them anyway to keep the
branches looking similar in this area.
In 9.0 and HEAD, also do some copy-editing on the WAL Reliability
documentation section.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since any of them might get used
on modern Linux versions.
First, avoid scanning the whole ProcArray once we know there
are at least commit_siblings active; second, skip the check
altogether if commit_siblings = 0.
Greg Smith
In particular, we are now more explicit about the fact that you may need
wal_sync_method=fsync_writethrough for crash-safety on some platforms,
including MaxOS X. There's also now an explicit caution against assuming
that the default setting of wal_sync_method is either crash-safe or best
for performance.
which is perhaps not a terribly good spot for it but there doesn't seem to be
a better place. Also add a source-code comment pointing out a couple reasons
for having a separate lock file. Per suggestion from Greg Smith.
Per gripe from Fujii Masao, though this is not exactly his proposed patch.
Categorize as DEVELOPER_OPTIONS and set context PGC_SIGHUP, as per Fujii,
but set the default to LOG because higher values aren't really sensible
(see the code for trace_recovery()). Fix the documentation to agree with
the code and to try to explain what the variable actually does. Get rid
of no-op calls trace_recovery(LOG), which accomplish nothing except to
demonstrate that this option confuses even its author.
Block elements with verbatim formatting (literallayout, programlisting,
screen, synopsis) should be aligned at column 0 independent of the surrounding
SGML, because whitespace is significant, and indenting them creates erratic
whitespace in the output. The CSS stylesheets already take care of indenting
the output.
Assorted markup improvements to go along with it.
I've added a quote_all_identifiers GUC which affects the behavior
of the backend, and a --quote-all-identifiers argument to pg_dump
and pg_dumpall which sets the GUC and also affects the quoting done
internally by those applications.
Design by Tom Lane; review by Alex Hunsaker; in response to bug #5488
filed by Hartmut Goebel.
Normally, we automatically restart after a backend crash, but in some
cases when PostgreSQL is invoked by clusterware it may be desirable to
suppress this behavior, so we provide an option which does this.
Since no existing GUC group quite fits, create a new group called
"error handling options" for this and the previously undocumented GUC
exit_on_error, which is now documented.
Review by Fujii Masao.
log files created by the syslogger process.
In passing, make unix_file_permissions display its value in octal, same
as log_file_mode now does.
Martin Pihlak
Per extensive discussion on pgsql-hackers. We are deliberately not
back-patching this even though the behavior of 8.3 and 8.4 is
unquestionably broken, for fear of breaking existing users of this
parameter. This incompatibility should be release-noted.
to have different values in different processes of the primary server.
Also put it into the "Streaming Replication" GUC category; it doesn't belong
in "Standby Servers" because you use it on the master not the standby.
In passing also correct guc.c's idea of wal_keep_segments' category.
max_standby_streaming_delay, and revise the implementation to avoid assuming
that timestamps found in WAL records can meaningfully be compared to clock
time on the standby server. Instead, the delay limits are compared to the
elapsed time since we last obtained a new WAL segment from archive or since
we were last "caught up" to WAL data arriving via streaming replication.
This avoids problems with clock skew between primary and standby, as well
as other corner cases that the original coding would misbehave in, such
as the primary server having significant idle time between transactions.
Per my complaint some time ago and considerable ensuing discussion.
Do some desultory editing on the hot standby documentation, too.
Robert Haas
Heikki Linnakangas
Bruce Momjian
Itagaki Takahiro
Magnus Hagander
Tom Lane
Simon Riggs
Peter Eisentraut