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.
StrategyGetBuffer() has proven to be a bottleneck in a number of
buffer acquisition heavy workloads. To some degree this has already
been alleviated by 5d7962c6, but it still can be quite a heavy
bottleneck. The problem is that in unfortunate usage patterns a
single StrategyGetBuffer() call will have to look at a large number of
buffers - in turn making it likely that the process will be put to
sleep while still holding the spinlock.
Replace most of the usage of the buffer_strategy_lock spinlock for the
clock sweep by a atomic nextVictimBuffer variable. That variable,
modulo NBuffers, is the current hand of the clock sweep. The buffer
clock-sweep then only needs to acquire the spinlock after a
wraparound. And even then only in the process that did the wrapping
around. That alleviates nearly all the contention on the relevant
spinlock, although significant contention on the cacheline can still
exist.
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas and Amit Kapila
Discussion: 20141010160020.GG6670@alap3.anarazel.de,
20141027133218.GA2639@awork2.anarazel.de
Previously, we did this just once per checkpoint, but that could make
Hot Standby take a long time to initialize. To avoid busying an
otherwise-idle system, we don't do this if no WAL has been written
since we did it last.
Andres Freund
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.
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.
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.
Commit 6d90eaaa89 added a hibernation mode
to the bgwriter to reduce the server's idle-power consumption. However,
its interaction with the detailed behavior of BgBufferSync's feedback
control loop wasn't very well thought out. That control loop depends
primarily on the rate of buffer allocation, not the rate of buffer
dirtying, so the hibernation mode has to be designed to operate only when
no new buffer allocations are happening. Also, the check for whether the
system is effectively idle was not quite right and would fail to detect
a constant low level of activity, thus allowing the bgwriter to go into
hibernation mode in a way that would let the cycle time vary quite a bit,
possibly further confusing the feedback loop. To fix, move the wakeup
support from MarkBufferDirty and SetBufferCommitInfoNeedsSave into
StrategyGetBuffer, and prevent the bgwriter from entering hibernation mode
unless no buffer allocations have happened recently.
In addition, fix the delaying logic to remove the problem of possibly not
responding to signals promptly, which was basically caused by trying to use
the process latch's is_set flag for multiple purposes. I can't prove it
but I'm suspicious that that hack was responsible for the intermittent
"postmaster does not shut down" failures we've been seeing in the buildfarm
lately. In any case it did nothing to improve the readability or
robustness of the code.
In passing, express the hibernation sleep time as a multiplier on
BgWriterDelay, not a constant. I'm not sure whether there's any value in
exposing the longer sleep time as an independently configurable setting,
but we can at least make it act like this for little extra code.
To make it wake up promptly when activity starts again, backends nudge it
by setting a latch in MarkBufferDirty(). The latch is kept set while
bgwriter is active, so there is very little overhead from that when the
system is busy. It is only armed before going into longer sleep.
Peter Geoghegan, with some changes by me.
bgwriter is now a much less important process, responsible for page
cleaning duties only. checkpointer is now responsible for checkpoints
and so has a key role in shutdown. Later patches will correct doc
references to the now old idea that bgwriter performs checkpoints.
Has beneficial effect on performance at high write rates, but mainly
refactoring to more easily allow changes for power reduction by
simplifying previously tortuous code around required to allow page
cleaning and checkpointing to time slice in the same process.
Patch by me, Review by Dickson Guedes
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.
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.
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.
When we need to insert a new entry and the queue is full, compact the
entire queue in the hopes of making room for the new entry. Doing this
on every insertion might worsen contention on BgWriterCommLock, but
when the queue it's full, it's far better than allowing the backend to
perform its own fsync, per testing by Greg Smith as reported in
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-01/msg02665.php
Original idea from Greg Smith. Patch by me. Review by Chris Browne
and Greg Smith
This new field counts the number of times that a backend which writes a
buffer out to the OS must also fsync() it. This happens when the
bgwriter fsync request queue is full, and is generally detrimental to
performance, so it's good to know when it's happening. Along the way,
log a new message at level DEBUG1 whenever we fail to hand off an fsync,
so that the problem can also be seen in examination of log files
(if the logging level is cranked up high enough).
Greg Smith, with minor tweaks by me.
This allows us to reliably remove all leftover temporary relation
files on cluster startup without reference to system catalogs or WAL;
therefore, we no longer include temporary relations in XLOG_XACT_COMMIT
and XLOG_XACT_ABORT WAL records.
Since these changes require including a backend ID in each
SharedInvalSmgrMsg, the size of the SharedInvalidationMessage.id
field has been reduced from two bytes to one, and the maximum number
of connections has been reduced from INT_MAX / 4 to 2^23-1. It would
be possible to remove these restrictions by increasing the size of
SharedInvalidationMessage by 4 bytes, but right now that doesn't seem
like a good trade-off.
Review by Jaime Casanova and Tom Lane.
rather than returning NULL for some-but-not-all failures as they used to.
Remove now-redundant tests for NULL from call sites.
We had to do something about this because many call sites were failing to
check for NULL; and changing it like this seems a lot more useful and
mistake-proof than adding checks to the call sites without them.
This includes two new kinds of postmaster processes, walsenders and
walreceiver. Walreceiver is responsible for connecting to the primary server
and streaming WAL to disk, while walsender runs in the primary server and
streams WAL from disk to the client.
Documentation still needs work, but the basics are there. We will probably
pull the replication section to a new chapter later on, as well as the
sections describing file-based replication. But let's do that as a separate
patch, so that it's easier to see what has been added/changed. This patch
also adds a new section to the chapter about FE/BE protocol, documenting the
protocol used by walsender/walreceivxer.
Bump catalog version because of two new functions,
pg_last_xlog_receive_location() and pg_last_xlog_replay_location(), for
monitoring the progress of replication.
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me
This patch gets us out from under the Unix limitation of two user-defined
signal types. We already had done something similar for signals directed to
the postmaster process; this adds multiplexing for signals directed to
backends and auxiliary processes (so long as they're connected to shared
memory).
As proof of concept, replace the former usage of SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2
for backends with use of the multiplexing mechanism. There are still some
hard-wired definitions of SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for other process types,
but getting rid of those doesn't seem interesting at the moment.
Fujii Masao
archive recovery. Invent a separate state variable and inquiry function
for XLogInsertAllowed() to clarify some tests and make the management of
writing the end-of-recovery checkpoint less klugy. Fix several places
that were incorrectly testing InRecovery when they should be looking at
RecoveryInProgress or XLogInsertAllowed (because they will now be executed
in the bgwriter not startup process). Clarify handling of bad LSNs passed
to XLogFlush during recovery. Use a spinlock for setting/testing
SharedRecoveryInProgress. Improve quite a lot of comments.
Heikki and Tom
during it:
When bgwriter is active, the startup process can't perform mdsync() correctly
because it won't see the fsync requests accumulated in bgwriter's private
pendingOpsTable. Therefore make bgwriter responsible for the end-of-recovery
checkpoint as well, when it's active.
When bgwriter is active (= archive recovery), the startup process must not
accumulate fsync requests to its own pendingOpsTable, since bgwriter won't
see them there when it performs restartpoints. Make startup process drop its
pendingOpsTable when bgwriter is launched to avoid that.
Update minimum recovery point one last time when leaving archive recovery.
It won't be updated by the end-of-recovery checkpoint because XLogFlush()
sees us as out of recovery already.
This fixes bug #4879 reported by Fujii Masao.
by extending the ereport() API to cater for pluralization directly. This
is better than the original method of calling ngettext outside the elog.c
code because (1) it avoids double translation, which wastes cycles and in
the worst case could give a wrong result; and (2) it avoids having to use
a different coding method in PL code than in the core backend. The
client-side uses of ngettext are not touched since neither of these concerns
is very pressing in the client environment. Per my proposal of yesterday.
copies?) to ensure they really don't run proc_exit/shmem_exit callbacks,
as was intended. I broke this behavior recently by installing atexit
callbacks without thinking about the one case where we truly don't want
to run those callback functions. Noted in an example from Dave Page.
In the backend, I changed only a handful of exemplary or important-looking
instances to make use of the plural support; there is probably more work
there. For the rest of the source, this should cover all relevant cases.
its usual buffer cleaning duties during archive recovery, and it's responsible
for performing restartpoints.
This requires some changes in postmaster. When the startup process has done
all the initialization and is ready to start WAL redo, it signals the
postmaster to launch the background writer. The postmaster is signaled again
when the point in recovery is reached where we know that the database is in
consistent state. Postmaster isn't interested in that at the moment, but
that's the point where we could let other backends in to perform read-only
queries. The postmaster is signaled third time when the recovery has ended,
so that postmaster knows that it's safe to start accepting connections.
The startup process now traps SIGTERM, and performs a "clean" shutdown. If
you do a fast shutdown during recovery, a shutdown restartpoint is performed,
like a shutdown checkpoint, and postmaster kills the processes cleanly. You
still have to continue the recovery at next startup, though.
Currently, the background writer is only launched during archive recovery.
We could launch it during crash recovery as well, but it seems better to keep
that codepath as simple as possible, for the sake of robustness. And it
couldn't do any restartpoints during crash recovery anyway, so it wouldn't be
that useful.
log_restartpoints is gone. Use log_checkpoints instead. This is yet to be
documented.
This whole operation is a pre-requisite for Hot Standby, but has some value of
its own whether the hot standby patch makes 8.4 or not.
Simon Riggs, with lots of modifications by me.
the bgwriter immediately. This covers the case where the bgwriter is still
starting up, as seen in a recent buildfarm failure. In future it might also
assist with clean recovery after a bgwriter termination and restart ---
right now the postmaster treats early bgwriter exit as a system crash,
but that might not always be so.
free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each
relation (except for hash indexes; they don't use FSM).
This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC options; remove any
trace of them from the backend, initdb, and documentation.
Rewrite contrib/pg_freespacemap to match the new FSM implementation. Also
introduce a new variant of the get_raw_page(regclass, int4, int4) function in
contrib/pageinspect that let's you to return pages from any relation fork, and
a new fsm_page_contents() function to inspect the new FSM pages.
of multiple forks, and each fork can be created and grown separately.
The bulk of this patch is about changing the smgr API to include an extra
ForkNumber argument in every smgr function. Also, smgrscheduleunlink and
smgrdounlink no longer implicitly call smgrclose, because other forks might
still exist after unlinking one. The callers of those functions have been
modified to call smgrclose instead.
This patch in itself doesn't have any user-visible effect, but provides the
infrastructure needed for upcoming patches. The additional forks envisioned
are a rewritten FSM implementation that doesn't rely on a fixed-size shared
memory block, and a visibility map to allow skipping portions of a table in
VACUUM that have no dead tuples.
unnecessary #include lines in it. Also, move some tuple routine prototypes and
macros to htup.h, which allows removal of heapam.h inclusion from some .c
files.
For this to work, a new header file access/sysattr.h needed to be created,
initially containing attribute numbers of system columns, for pg_dump usage.
While at it, make contrib ltree, intarray and hstore header files more
consistent with our header style.
data structures and backend internal APIs. This solves problems we've seen
recently with inconsistent layout of pg_control between machines that have
32-bit time_t and those that have already migrated to 64-bit time_t. Also,
we can get out from under the problem that Windows' Unix-API emulation is not
consistent about the width of time_t.
There are a few remaining places where local time_t variables are used to hold
the current or recent result of time(NULL). I didn't bother changing these
since they do not affect any cross-module APIs and surely all platforms will
have 64-bit time_t before overflow becomes an actual risk. time_t should
be avoided for anything visible to extension modules, however.
buffers that cannot possibly need to be cleaned, and estimates how many
buffers it should try to clean based on moving averages of recent allocation
requests and density of reusable buffers. The patch also adds a couple
more columns to pg_stat_bgwriter to help measure the effectiveness of the
bgwriter.
Greg Smith, building on his own work and ideas from several other people,
in particular a much older patch from Itagaki Takahiro.
we'd dump core anyway immediately afterward if it were null; and it
seems to confuse some versions of icc into generating bad code.
Per report from Sergey Koposov. Patched in HEAD only, for the moment,
since this is only likely to affect developers.
recover from elog(ERROR). Problem was created by introduction of hash seq
search tracking awhile back, and affects all branches that have bgwriter;
in HEAD the disease has snuck into autovacuum and walwriter too. (Not sure
that the latter two use hash_seq_search at the moment, but surely they might
someday.) Per report from Sergey Koposov.
checkpoint. The comment claimed that we could do this anytime after
setting the checkpoint REDO point, but actually BufferSync is relying
on the assumption that buffers dumped by other backends will be fsync'd
too. So we really could not do it any sooner than we are doing it.
over a fairly long period of time, rather than being spat out in a burst.
This happens only for background checkpoints carried out by the bgwriter;
other cases, such as a shutdown checkpoint, are still done at full speed.
Remove the "all buffers" scan in the bgwriter, and associated stats
infrastructure, since this seems no longer very useful when the checkpoint
itself is properly throttled.
Original patch by Itagaki Takahiro, reworked by Heikki Linnakangas,
and some minor API editorialization by me.
and aborted transactions have different effects; also teach it not to assume
that prepared transactions are always committed.
Along the way, simplify the pgstats API by tying counting directly to
Relations; I cannot detect any redeeming social value in having stats
pointers in HeapScanDesc and IndexScanDesc structures. And fix a few
corner cases in which counts might be missed because the relation's
pgstat_info pointer hadn't been set.
is deleted. A backend about to unlink a file now sends a "revoke fsync"
request to the bgwriter to make it clean out pending fsync requests. There
is still a race condition where the bgwriter may try to fsync after the unlink
has happened, but we can resolve that by rechecking the fsync request queue
to see if a revoke request arrived meanwhile. This eliminates the former
kluge of "just assuming" that an ENOENT failure is okay, and lets us handle
the fact that on Windows it might be EACCES too without introducing any
questionable assumptions. After an idea of mine improved by Magnus.
The HEAD patch doesn't apply cleanly to 8.2, but I'll see about a back-port
later. In the meantime this could do with some testing on Windows; I've been
able to force it through the code path via ENOENT, but that doesn't prove that
it actually fixes the Windows problem ...
should allow delete-pending files to actually go away, and thereby work
around the various complaints we've seen about 'permission denied'
errors in such cases. Should be reasonably harmless in any case...
StartupXLOG and ShutdownXLOG no longer need to be critical sections, because
in all contexts where they are invoked, elog(ERROR) would be translated to
elog(FATAL) anyway. (One change in bgwriter.c is needed to make this true:
set ExitOnAnyError before trying to exit. This is a good fix anyway since
the existing code would have gone into an infinite loop on elog(ERROR) during
shutdown.) That avoids a misleading report of PANIC during semi-orderly
failures. Modify the postmaster to include the startup process in the set of
processes that get SIGTERM when a fast shutdown is requested, and also fix it
to not try to restart the bgwriter if the bgwriter fails while trying to write
the shutdown checkpoint. Net result is that "pg_ctl stop -m fast" does
something reasonable for a system in warm standby mode, and so should Unix
system shutdown (ie, universal SIGTERM). Per gripe from Stephen Harris and
some corner-case testing of my own.
Windows), arrange for each postmaster child process to be its own process
group leader, and deliver signals SIGINT, SIGTERM, SIGQUIT to the whole
process group not only the direct child process. This provides saner behavior
for archive and recovery scripts; in particular, it's possible to shut down a
warm-standby recovery server using "pg_ctl stop -m immediate", since delivery
of SIGQUIT to the startup subprocess will result in killing the waiting
recovery_command. Also, this makes Query Cancel and statement_timeout apply
to scripts being run from backends via system(). (There is no support in the
core backend for that, but it's widely done using untrusted PLs.) Per gripe
from Stephen Harris and subsequent discussion.
promoted to FATAL) end in exit(1) not exit(0). Then change the postmaster to
allow exit(1) without a system-wide panic, but not for the startup subprocess
or the bgwriter. There were a couple of places that were using exit(1) to
deliberately force a system-wide panic; adjust these to be exit(2) instead.
This fixes the problem noted back in July that if the startup process exits
with elog(ERROR), the postmaster would think everything is hunky-dory and
proceed to start up. Alternative solutions such as trying to run the entire
startup process as a critical section seem less clean, primarily because of
the fact that a fair amount of startup code is shared by all postmaster
children in the EXEC_BACKEND case. We'd need an ugly special case somewhere
near the head of main.c to make it work if it's the child process's
responsibility to determine what happens; and what's the point when the
postmaster already treats different children differently?
than N seconds apart. This allows a simple, if not very high performance,
means of guaranteeing that a PITR archive is no more than N seconds behind
real time. Also make pg_current_xlog_location return the WAL Write pointer,
add pg_current_xlog_insert_location to return the Insert pointer, and fix
pg_xlogfile_name_offset to return its results as a two-element record instead
of a smashed-together string, as per recent discussion.
Simon Riggs
recovered. I did not see any actual leak while testing this in CVS tip,
but 8.0 definitely has a problem with leaking the space temporarily
palloc'd by BufferSync(). In any case this seems a good idea to forestall
similar problems in future. Per report from Arjen van der Meijden.
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.
doesn't block the bgwriter from making progress writing out other buffers.
This was a hard problem in the context of the ARC/2Q design, but it's
trivial in the context of clock sweep ... just advance the sweep counter
before we try to write not after.
the difference between checkpoints forced due to WAL segment consumption
and checkpoints forced for other reasons (such as CREATE DATABASE). Avoid
generating 'checkpoints are occurring too frequently' messages when the
checkpoint wasn't caused by WAL segment consumption. Per gripe from
Chris K-L.
hash table. This is a pretty unlikely scenario, since the table
should be tiny, but we can't guarantee continued correct operation
if it does occur. Spotted by Qingqing Zhou.
the freelist, plus per-buffer spinlocks that protect access to individual
shared buffer headers. This requires abandoning a global freelist (since
the freelist is a global contention point), which shoots down ARC and 2Q
as well as plain LRU management. Adopt a clock sweep algorithm instead.
Preliminary results show substantial improvement in multi-backend situations.
is the minimum required fix. I want to look next at taking advantage of
it by simplifying the message semantics in the shared inval message queue,
but that part can be held over for 8.1 if it turns out too ugly.
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 ...
files and directories. This ensures that the bgwriter will close any open
file references it is holding for files therein, which is needed for the
rmdir() to succeed. Andrew Dunstan and Tom Lane.
possible to trap an error inside a function rather than letting it
propagate out to PostgresMain. You still have to use AbortCurrentTransaction
to clean up, but at least the error handling itself will cooperate.
place of time_t, as per prior discussion. The behavior does not change
on machines without a 64-bit-int type, but on machines with one, which
is most, we are rid of the bizarre boundary behavior at the edges of
the 32-bit-time_t range (1901 and 2038). The system will now treat
times over the full supported timestamp range as being in your local
time zone. It may seem a little bizarre to consider that times in
4000 BC are PST or EST, but this is surely at least as reasonable as
propagating Gregorian calendar rules back that far.
I did not modify the format of the zic timezone database files, which
means that for the moment the system will not know about daylight-savings
periods outside the range 1901-2038. Given the way the files are set up,
it's not a simple decision like 'widen to 64 bits'; we have to actually
think about the range of years that need to be supported. We should
probably inquire what the plans of the upstream zic people are before
making any decisions of our own.
explicitly fsync'ing every (non-temp) file we have written since the
last checkpoint. In the vast majority of cases, the burden of the
fsyncs should fall on the bgwriter process not on backends. (To this
end, we assume that an fsync issued by the bgwriter will force out
blocks written to the same file by other processes using other file
descriptors. Anyone have a problem with that?) This makes the world
safe for WIN32, which ain't even got sync(2), and really makes the world
safe for Unixen as well, because sync(2) never had the semantics we need:
it offers no way to wait for the requested I/O to finish.
Along the way, fix a bug I recently introduced in xlog recovery:
file truncation replay failed to clear bufmgr buffers for the dropped
blocks, which could result in 'PANIC: heap_delete_redo: no block'
later on in xlog replay.