Move common code, that was duplicated in every postmaster child/every
standalone process, into two functions in miscinit.c. Not only does
that already result in a fair amount of net code reduction but it also
makes it much easier to remove more duplication in the future. The
prime motivation wasn't code deduplication though, but easier addition
of new common code.
Previously, if you wanted anything besides C-string hash keys, you had to
specify a custom hashing function to hash_create(). Nearly all such
callers were specifying tag_hash or oid_hash; which is tedious, and rather
error-prone, since a caller could easily miss the opportunity to optimize
by using hash_uint32 when appropriate. Replace this with a design whereby
callers using simple binary-data keys just specify HASH_BLOBS and don't
need to mess with specific support functions. hash_create() itself will
take care of optimizing when the key size is four bytes.
This nets out saving a few hundred bytes of code space, and offers
a measurable performance improvement in tidbitmap.c (which was not
exploiting the opportunity to use hash_uint32 for its 4-byte keys).
There might be some wins elsewhere too, I didn't analyze closely.
In future we could look into offering a similar optimized hashing function
for 8-byte keys. Under this design that could be done in a centralized
and machine-independent fashion, whereas getting it right for keys of
platform-dependent sizes would've been notationally painful before.
For the moment, the old way still works fine, so as not to break source
code compatibility for loadable modules. Eventually we might want to
remove tag_hash and friends from the exported API altogether, since there's
no real need for them to be explicitly referenced from outside dynahash.c.
Teodor Sigaev and Tom Lane
The assertion failed if WAL_DEBUG or LWLOCK_STATS was enabled; fix that by
using separate memory contexts for the allocations made within those code
blocks.
This patch introduces a mechanism for marking any memory context as allowed
in a critical section. Previously ErrorContext was exempt as a special case.
Instead of a blanket exception of the checkpointer process, only exempt the
memory context used for the pending ops hash table.
We used to set it to the current recovery target timeline, but the recovery
target timeline can change during recovery, leaving ThisTimeLineID at an
old value. That seems worse than always leaving it at zero to begin with.
AFAICS there was no good reason to set it in the first place. ThisTimeLineID
is not needed in checkpointer or bgwriter process, until it's time to write
the end-of-recovery checkpoint, and at that point ThisTimeLineID is updated
anyway.
If an SMgrRelation is not "owned" by a relcache entry, don't allow it to
live past transaction end. This design allows the same SMgrRelation to be
used for blind writes of multiple blocks during a transaction, but ensures
that we don't hold onto such an SMgrRelation indefinitely. Because an
SMgrRelation typically corresponds to open file descriptors at the fd.c
level, leaving it open when there's no corresponding relcache entry can
mean that we prevent the kernel from reclaiming deleted disk space.
(While CacheInvalidateSmgr messages usually fix that, there are cases
where they're not issued, such as DROP DATABASE. We might want to add
some more sinval messaging for that, but I'd be inclined to keep this
type of logic anyway, since allowing VFDs to accumulate indefinitely
for blind-written relations doesn't seem like a good idea.)
This code replaces a previous attempt towards the same goal that proved
to be unreliable. Back-patch to 9.1 where the previous patch was added.
ForwardFsyncRequest() supposed that it could only be called in regular
backends, which used to be true; but since the splitup of bgwriter and
checkpointer, it is also called in the bgwriter. We do not want to count
such calls in pg_stat_bgwriter.buffers_backend statistics, so fix things
so that they aren't.
(It's worth noting here that this implies an alarmingly large increase in
the expected amount of cross-process fsync request traffic, which may well
mean that the process splitup was not such a hot idea.)
mdinit() was misusing IsBootstrapProcessingMode() to decide whether to
create an fsync pending-operations table in the current process. This led
to creating a table not only in the startup and checkpointer processes as
intended, but also in the bgwriter process, not to mention other auxiliary
processes such as walwriter and walreceiver. Creation of the table in the
bgwriter is fatal, because it absorbs fsync requests that should have gone
to the checkpointer; instead they just sit in bgwriter local memory and are
never acted on. So writes performed by the bgwriter were not being fsync'd
which could result in data loss after an OS crash. I think there is no
live bug with respect to walwriter and walreceiver because those never
perform any writes of shared buffers; but the potential is there for
future breakage in those processes too.
To fix, make AuxiliaryProcessMain() export the current process's
AuxProcType as a global variable, and then make mdinit() test directly for
the types of aux process that should have a pendingOpsTable. Having done
that, we might as well also get rid of the random bool flags such as
am_walreceiver that some of the aux processes had grown. (Note that we
could not have fixed the bug by examining those variables in mdinit(),
because it's called from BaseInit() which is run by AuxiliaryProcessMain()
before entering any of the process-type-specific code.)
Back-patch to 9.2, where the problem was introduced by the split-up of
bgwriter and checkpointer processes. The bogus pendingOpsTable exists
in walwriter and walreceiver processes in earlier branches, but absent
any evidence that it causes actual problems there, I'll leave the older
branches alone.
In all branches back to 8.3, this patch fixes a questionable assumption in
CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue that there are
no uninitialized pad bytes in the request queue structs. This would only
cause trouble if (a) there were such pad bytes, which could happen in 8.4
and up if the compiler makes enum ForkNumber narrower than 32 bits, but
otherwise would require not-currently-planned changes in the widths of
other typedefs; and (b) the kernel has not uniformly initialized the
contents of shared memory to zeroes. Still, it seems a tad risky, and we
can easily remove any risk by pre-zeroing the request array for ourselves.
In addition to that, we need to establish a coding rule that struct
RelFileNode can't contain any padding bytes, since such structs are copied
into the request array verbatim. (There are other places that are assuming
this anyway, it turns out.)
In 9.1 and up, the risk was a bit larger because we were also effectively
assuming that struct RelFileNodeBackend contained no pad bytes, and with
fields of different types in there, that would be much easier to break.
However, there is no good reason to ever transmit fsync or delete requests
for temp files to the bgwriter/checkpointer, so we can revert the request
structs to plain RelFileNode, getting rid of the padding risk and saving
some marginal number of bytes and cycles in fsync queue manipulation while
we are at it. The savings might be more than marginal during deletion of
a temp relation, because the old code transmitted an entirely useless but
nonetheless expensive-to-process ForgetRelationFsync request to the
background process, and also had the background process perform the file
deletion even though that can safely be done immediately.
In addition, make some cleanup of nearby comments and small improvements to
the code in CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue.
This simplifies code that needs to do arithmetic on XLogRecPtrs.
To avoid changing on-disk format of data pages, the LSN on data pages is
still stored in the old format. That should keep pg_upgrade happy. However,
we have XLogRecPtrs embedded in the control file, and in the structs that
are sent over the replication protocol, so this changes breaks compatibility
of pg_basebackup and server. I didn't do anything about this in this patch,
per discussion on -hackers, the right thing to do would to be to change the
replication protocol to be architecture-independent, so that you could use
a newer version of pg_receivexlog, for example, against an older server
version.
The comments claimed that wasting the last segment made it easier to do
calculations with XLogRecPtrs, because you don't have problems representing
last-byte-position-plus-1 that way. In my experience, however, it only made
things more complicated, because the there was two ways to represent the
boundary at the beginning of a logical log file: logid = n+1 and xrecoff = 0,
or as xlogid = n and xrecoff = 4GB - XLOG_SEG_SIZE. Some functions were
picky about which representation was used.
Also, use a 64-bit segment number instead of the log/seg combination, to
point to a certain WAL segment. We assume that all platforms have a working
64-bit integer type nowadays.
This is an incompatible change in WAL format, so bumping WAL version number.
Re-implements similar functionality in 9.1 and previously which
was removed during split of checkpointer and bgwriter.
Requested/spotted by Magnus Hagander
Per a suggestion from Peter Geoghegan, make WaitLatch responsible for
verifying that the WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH bit it returns is truthful (by
testing PostmasterIsAlive). Then simplify its callers, who no longer
need to do that for themselves. Remove weasel wording about falsely-set
result bits from WaitLatch's API contract.
In checkpointer and walwriter, avoid calling PostmasterIsAlive unless
WaitLatch has reported WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH. This saves a kernel call per
iteration of the process's outer loop, which is not all that much, but a
cycle shaved is a cycle earned. I had already removed the unconditional
PostmasterIsAlive calls in bgwriter and pgstat in previous patches, but
forgot that WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH is supposed to be treated as untrustworthy
(per comment in unix_latch.c); so adjust those two cases to match.
There are a few other places where the same idea might be applied, but only
after substantial code rearrangement, so I didn't bother.
Get rid of some more naming choices that only make sense if you know that
this code used to be in the bgwriter, as well as some stray comments
referencing the bgwriter.
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
Base backup follows recommended procedure, plus goes to great
lengths to ensure that partial page writes are avoided.
Jun Ishizuka and Fujii Masao, with minor modifications
Andres Freund
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Heikki Linnakangas
Alvaro Herrera
Simon Riggs
Robert Haas