This GUC allows limiting the time spent waiting to acquire any one
heavyweight lock.
In support of this, improve the recently-added timeout infrastructure
to permit efficiently enabling or disabling multiple timeouts at once.
That reduces the performance hit from turning on lock_timeout, though
it's still not zero.
Zoltán Böszörményi, reviewed by Tom Lane,
Stephen Frost, and Hari Babu
This patch introduces two additional lock modes for tuples: "SELECT FOR
KEY SHARE" and "SELECT FOR NO KEY UPDATE". These don't block each
other, in contrast with already existing "SELECT FOR SHARE" and "SELECT
FOR UPDATE". UPDATE commands that do not modify the values stored in
the columns that are part of the key of the tuple now grab a SELECT FOR
NO KEY UPDATE lock on the tuple, allowing them to proceed concurrently
with tuple locks of the FOR KEY SHARE variety.
Foreign key triggers now use FOR KEY SHARE instead of FOR SHARE; this
means the concurrency improvement applies to them, which is the whole
point of this patch.
The added tuple lock semantics require some rejiggering of the multixact
module, so that the locking level that each transaction is holding can
be stored alongside its Xid. Also, multixacts now need to persist
across server restarts and crashes, because they can now represent not
only tuple locks, but also tuple updates. This means we need more
careful tracking of lifetime of pg_multixact SLRU files; since they now
persist longer, we require more infrastructure to figure out when they
can be removed. pg_upgrade also needs to be careful to copy
pg_multixact files over from the old server to the new, or at least part
of multixact.c state, depending on the versions of the old and new
servers.
Tuple time qualification rules (HeapTupleSatisfies routines) need to be
careful not to consider tuples with the "is multi" infomask bit set as
being only locked; they might need to look up MultiXact values (i.e.
possibly do pg_multixact I/O) to find out the Xid that updated a tuple,
whereas they previously were assured to only use information readily
available from the tuple header. This is considered acceptable, because
the extra I/O would involve cases that would previously cause some
commands to block waiting for concurrent transactions to finish.
Another important change is the fact that locking tuples that have
previously been updated causes the future versions to be marked as
locked, too; this is essential for correctness of foreign key checks.
This causes additional WAL-logging, also (there was previously a single
WAL record for a locked tuple; now there are as many as updated copies
of the tuple there exist.)
With all this in place, contention related to tuples being checked by
foreign key rules should be much reduced.
As a bonus, the old behavior that a subtransaction grabbing a stronger
tuple lock than the parent (sub)transaction held on a given tuple and
later aborting caused the weaker lock to be lost, has been fixed.
Many new spec files were added for isolation tester framework, to ensure
overall behavior is sane. There's probably room for several more tests.
There were several reviewers of this patch; in particular, Noah Misch
and Andres Freund spent considerable time in it. Original idea for the
patch came from Simon Riggs, after a problem report by Joel Jacobson.
Most code is from me, with contributions from Marti Raudsepp, Alexander
Shulgin, Noah Misch and Andres Freund.
This patch was discussed in several pgsql-hackers threads; the most
important start at the following message-ids:
AANLkTimo9XVcEzfiBR-ut3KVNDkjm2Vxh+t8kAmWjPuv@mail.gmail.com1290721684-sup-3951@alvh.no-ip.org1294953201-sup-2099@alvh.no-ip.org1320343602-sup-2290@alvh.no-ip.org1339690386-sup-8927@alvh.no-ip.org4FE5FF020200002500048A3D@gw.wicourts.gov4FEAB90A0200002500048B7D@gw.wicourts.gov
Serializable Snapshot Isolation used for serializable transactions
depends on acquiring SIRead locks on all heap relation tuples which
are used to generate the query result, so that a later delete or
update of any of the tuples can flag a read-write conflict between
transactions. This is normally handled in heapam.c, with tuple level
locking. Since an index-only scan avoids heap access in many cases,
building the result from the index tuple, the necessary predicate
locks were not being acquired for all tuples in an index-only scan.
To prevent problems with tuple IDs which are vacuumed and re-used
while the transaction still matters, the xmin of the tuple is part of
the tag for the tuple lock. Since xmin is not available to the
index-only scan for result rows generated from the index tuples, it
is not possible to acquire a tuple-level predicate lock in such
cases, in spite of having the tid. If we went to the heap to get the
xmin value, it would no longer be an index-only scan. Rather than
prohibit index-only scans under serializable transaction isolation,
we acquire an SIRead lock on the page containing the tuple, when it
was not necessary to visit the heap for other reasons.
Backpatch to 9.2.
Kevin Grittner and Tom Lane
There is no point in running this test when prepared transactions are disabled,
which is the default. New make targets that include the test are provided. This
will save some useless waste of cycles on buildfarm machines.
Backpatch to 9.1 where these tests were introduced.
Much more could be done here, but at least now we have *some* automated
test coverage of that mechanism. In particular this tests the writable-CTE
case reported by Phil Sorber.
In passing, remove isolationtester's arbitrary restriction on the number of
steps in a permutation list. I used this so that a single spec file could
be used to run several related test scenarios, but there are other possible
reasons to want a step series that's not exactly a permutation. Improve
documentation and fix a couple other nits as well.
This was deemed unnecessary initially but in later discussion it was
agreed otherwise.
Original file from Kevin Grittner, allegedly from Dan Ports.
I had to clean up whitespace a bit per changes from Heikki.
order of begin, prepare, and commit of three concurrent transactions that
have conflicts between them.
The test runs for a quite long time, and the expected output file is huge,
but this test caught some serious bugs during development, so seems
worthwhile to keep. The test uses prepared transactions, so it fails if the
server has max_prepared_transactions=0. Because of that, it's marked as
"ignore" in the schedule file.
Dan Ports
This enables us to test that blocking commands (such as foreign keys
checks that conflict with some other lock) act as intended. The set of
tests that this adds is pretty minimal, but can easily be extended by
adding new specs.
The intention is that this will serve as a basis for ensuring that
further tweaks of locking implementation preserve (or improve) existing
behavior.
Author: Noah Misch
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
Alvaro Herrera
Tom Lane
Simon Riggs
Kevin Grittner
Andrew Dunstan
Heikki Linnakangas