Replication occurs only to memory on standby, not to disk,
so provides additional performance if user wishes to
reduce durability level slightly. Adds concept of multiple
independent sync rep queues.
Fujii Masao and Simon Riggs
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.
In pursuit of this (and with the expectation that WaitLatch will be needed
in more places), convert the latch field that was already added to PGPROC
for sync rep into a generic latch that is activated for all PGPROC-owning
processes, and change many of the standard backend signal handlers to set
that latch when a signal happens. This will allow WaitLatch callers to be
wakened properly by these signals.
In passing, fix a whole bunch of signal handlers that had been hacked to do
things that might change errno, without adding the necessary save/restore
logic for errno. Also make some minor fixes in unix_latch.c, and clean
up bizarre and unsafe scheme for disowning the process's latch. Much of
this has to be back-patched into 9.1.
Peter Geoghegan, with additional work by Tom
The original definition had the problem that timeouts exceeding about 2100
seconds couldn't be specified on 32-bit machines. Milliseconds seem like
sufficient resolution, and finer grain than that would be fantasy anyway
on many platforms.
Back-patch to 9.1 so that this aspect of the latch API won't change between
9.1 and later releases.
Peter Geoghegan
Improve the documentation around weak-memory-ordering risks, and do a pass
of general editorialization on the comments in the latch code. Make the
Windows latch code more like the Unix latch code where feasible; in
particular provide the same Assert checks in both implementations.
Fix poorly-placed WaitLatch call in syncrep.c.
This patch resolves, for the moment, concerns around weak-memory-ordering
bugs in latch-related code: we have documented the restrictions and checked
that existing calls meet them. In 9.2 I hope that we will install suitable
memory barrier instructions in SetLatch/ResetLatch, so that their callers
don't need to be quite so careful.
Standby servers can now have WALSender processes, which can work with
either WALReceiver or archive_commands to pass data. Fully updated
docs, including new conceptual terms of sending server, upstream and
downstream servers. WALSenders terminated when promote to master.
Fujii Masao, review, rework and doc rewrite by Simon Riggs
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.
The previous functions of assign hooks are now split between check hooks
and assign hooks, where the former can fail but the latter shouldn't.
Aside from being conceptually clearer, this approach exposes the
"canonicalized" form of the variable value to guc.c without having to do
an actual assignment. And that lets us fix the problem recently noted by
Bernd Helmle that the auto-tune patch for wal_buffers resulted in bogus
log messages about "parameter "wal_buffers" cannot be changed without
restarting the server". There may be some speed advantage too, because
this design lets hook functions avoid re-parsing variable values when
restoring a previous state after a rollback (they can store a pre-parsed
representation of the value instead). This patch also resolves a
longstanding annoyance about custom error messages from variable assign
hooks: they should modify, not appear separately from, guc.c's own message
about "invalid parameter value".
This means one less thing to configure when setting up synchronous
replication, and also avoids some ambiguity around what the behavior
should be when the settings of these variables conflict.
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me.
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.
1. Don't ignore query cancel interrupts. Instead, if the user asks to
cancel the query after we've already committed it, but before it's on
the standby, just emit a warning and let the COMMIT finish.
2. Don't ignore die interrupts (pg_terminate_backend or fast shutdown).
Instead, emit a warning message and close the connection without
acknowledging the commit. Other backends will still see the effect of
the commit, but there's no getting around that; it's too late to abort
at this point, and ignoring die interrupts altogether doesn't seem like
a good idea.
3. If synchronous_standby_names becomes empty, wake up all backends
waiting for synchronous replication to complete. Without this, someone
attempting to shut synchronous replication off could easily wedge the
entire system instead.
4. Avoid depending on the assumption that if a walsender updates
MyProc->syncRepState, we'll see the change even if we read it without
holding the lock. The window for this appears to be quite narrow (and
probably doesn't exist at all on machines with strong memory ordering)
but protecting against it is practically free, so do that.
5. Remove useless state SYNC_REP_MUST_DISCONNECT, which isn't needed and
doesn't actually do anything.
There's still some further work needed here to make the behavior of fast
shutdown plausible, but that looks complex, so I'm leaving it for a
separate commit. Review by Fujii Masao.
It's not a good idea to kill the postmaster just because someone muffs
this, and it's not consistent with what we do for other, similar GUCs.
Fujii Masao, with a bit more hacking by me
SyncRepRequested() must check not only the value of the
synchronous_replication GUC but also whether max_wal_senders > 0.
Otherwise, we might end up waiting for sync rep even when there's no
possibility of a standby ever managing to connect. There are some
existing cross-checks to prevent this, but they're not quite sufficient:
the user can start the server with max_wal_senders=0,
synchronous_standby_names='', and synchronous_replication=off and then
subsequent make synchronous_standby_names not empty using pg_ctl reload,
and then SET synchronous_standby=on, leading to an indefinite hang.
Along the way, rename the global variable for the synchronous_replication
GUC to match the name of the GUC itself, for clarity.
Report by Fujii Masao, though I didn't use his patch.
Simon Riggs
Bruce Momjian
Alvaro Herrera
Tom Lane
Heikki Linnakangas
Peter Eisentraut
Robert Haas
Itagaki Takahiro