Enabled by recovery_connections = on (default) and forcing archive recovery using a recovery.conf. Recovery processing now emulates the original transactions as they are replayed, providing full locking and MVCC behaviour for read only queries. Recovery must enter consistent state before connections are allowed, so there is a delay, typically short, before connections succeed. Replay of recovering transactions can conflict and in some cases deadlock with queries during recovery; these result in query cancellation after max_standby_delay seconds have expired. Infrastructure changes have minor effects on normal running, though introduce four new types of WAL record.
New test mode "make standbycheck" allows regression tests of static command behaviour on a standby server while in recovery. Typical and extreme dynamic behaviours have been checked via code inspection and manual testing. Few port specific behaviours have been utilised, though primary testing has been on Linux only so far.
This commit is the basic patch. Additional changes will follow in this release to enhance some aspects of behaviour, notably improved handling of conflicts, deadlock detection and query cancellation. Changes to VACUUM FULL are also required.
Simon Riggs, with significant and lengthy review by Heikki Linnakangas, including streamlined redesign of snapshot creation and two-phase commit.
Important contributions from Florian Pflug, Mark Kirkwood, Merlin Moncure, Greg Stark, Gianni Ciolli, Gabriele Bartolini, Hannu Krosing, Robert Haas, Tatsuo Ishii, Hiroyuki Yamada plus support and feedback from many other community members.
SLRU area. The number of slots is still a compile-time constant (someday
we might want to change that), but at least it's a different constant for
each SLRU area. Increase number of subtrans buffers to 32 based on
experimentation with a heavily subtrans-bashing test case, and increase
number of multixact member buffers to 16, since it's obviously silly for
it not to be at least twice the number of multixact offset buffers.
to 'Size' (that is, size_t), and install overflow detection checks in it.
This allows us to remove the former arbitrary restrictions on NBuffers
etc. It won't make any difference in a 32-bit machine, but in a 64-bit
machine you could theoretically have terabytes of shared buffers.
(How efficiently we could manage 'em remains to be seen.) Similarly,
num_temp_buffers, work_mem, and maintenance_work_mem can be set above
2Gb on a 64-bit machine. Original patch from Koichi Suzuki, additional
work by moi.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
updates are no longer WAL-logged nor even fsync'd; we do not need to,
since after a crash no old pg_subtrans data is needed again. We truncate
pg_subtrans to RecentGlobalXmin at each checkpoint. slru.c's API is
refactored a little bit to separate out the necessary decisions.
RecentXmin (== MyProc->xmin). This ensures that it will be safe to
truncate pg_subtrans at RecentGlobalXmin, which should largely eliminate
any fear of bloat. Along the way, eliminate SubTransXidsHaveCommonAncestor,
which isn't really needed and could not give a trustworthy result anyway
under the lookback restriction.
In an unrelated but nearby change, #ifdef out GetUndoRecPtr, which has
been dead code since 2001 and seems unlikely to ever be resurrected.
performance front, but with feature freeze upon us I think it's time to
drive a stake in the ground and say that this will be in 7.5.
Alvaro Herrera, with some help from Tom Lane.
