or abort within a backend; rearrange InitPostgres processing to make it so.
Revealed by just-added Asserts along with ECPG regression tests (hm, I wonder
why the core regression tests didn't expose it?). This possibly is another
reason for missing stats updates ...
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.
messages to the stats collector. This avoids the problem that enabling
stats_row_level for autovacuum has a significant overhead for short
read-only transactions, as noted by Arjen van der Meijden. We can avoid
an extra gettimeofday call by piggybacking on the one done for WAL-logging
xact commit or abort (although that doesn't help read-only transactions,
since they don't WAL-log anything).
In my proposal for this, I noted that we could change the WAL log entries
for commit/abort to record full TimestampTz precision, instead of only
time_t as at present. That's not done in this patch, but will be committed
separately.
when a relation is opened multiple times in the same transaction. This is
particularly useful for system catalogs, which we may heap_open or index_open
many times in a transaction, and it doesn't really cost anything extra even
if the rel is touched but once. Motivated by study of an example from Greg
Stark, in which pgstat_initstats() accounted for an unreasonably large
fraction of the runtime.
its table list and then rechecks pgstat before vacuuming each table to
verify that no one has vacuumed the table in the meantime.
In the current autovacuum world this only means that a worker will not
vacuum a table that a user has vacuumed manually after the worker started.
When support for multiple autovacuum workers is introduced, this will reduce
the probability of simultaneous workers on the same database doing redundant
work.
continuously, and requests vacuum runs of "autovacuum workers" to postmaster.
The workers do the actual vacuum work. This allows for future improvements,
like allowing multiple autovacuum jobs running in parallel.
For now, the code keeps the original behavior of having a single autovac
process at any time by sleeping until the previous worker has finished.
entries for the victim database go away sooner rather than later. We already
did the equivalent thing at the per-relation level, not sure why it's not
been done for whole databases. With this change, pgstat_vacuum_tabstat
should usually not find anything to do; though we still need it as a backstop
in case DROPDB or TABPURGE messages get lost under load.
already collected in the current transaction; this allows plpgsql functions to
watch for stats updates even though they are confined to a single transaction.
Use this instead of the previous kluge involving pg_stat_file() to wait for
the stats collector to update in the stats regression test. Internally,
decouple storage of stats snapshots from transaction boundaries; they'll
now stick around until someone calls pgstat_clear_snapshot --- which xact.c
still does at transaction end, to maintain the previous behavior. This makes
the logic a lot cleaner, at the price of a couple dozen cycles per transaction
exit.
input in the stats collector. Our select() emulation is apparently buggy
for UDP sockets :-(. This should resolve problems with stats collection
(and hence autovacuum) failing under more than minimal load. Diagnosis
and patch by Magnus Hagander.
Patch probably needs to be back-ported to 8.1 and 8.0, but first let's
see if it makes the buildfarm happy...
(or other types of pg_class entry): the function pgstat_vacuum_tabstat,
invoked during VACUUM startup, had runtime proportional to the number of
stats table entries times the number of pg_class rows; in other words
O(N^2) if the stats collector's information is reasonably complete.
Replace list searching with a hash table to bring it back to O(N)
behavior. Per report from kim at myemma.com.
Back-patch as far as 8.1; 8.0 and before use different coding here.
identify long-running transactions. Since we already need to record
the transaction-start time (e.g. for now()), we don't need any
additional system calls to report this information.
Catversion bumped, initdb required.
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.
pgstat_bestart() has been called; else any lock-block occurring
during InitPostgres() is disastrous. I believe this explains
recent wasp regression failure; at least it explains the crash I
got while trying to duplicate the problem. I also made
pgstat_report_activity() safe against the same scenario, just
in case. The report_waiting hazard was created by my patch of
19-Aug to include waiting status in pg_stat_activity.
that ps_status provides by appending 'waiting' to the PS display. This
completes the project of making it feasible to turn off process title
updates and instead rely on pg_stat_activity. Per my suggestion a few
weeks ago.
EINTR; the stats code was failing to do this and so were a couple of places
in the postmaster. The stats code assumed that recv() could not return EINTR
if a preceding select() showed the socket to be read-ready, but this is
demonstrably false with our Windows implementation of recv(), and it may
not be the case on all Unix variants either. I think this explains the
intermittent stats regression test failures we've been seeing, as well
as reports of stats collector instability under high load on Windows.
Backpatch as far as 8.0.
be delivered directly to the collector process. The extra process context
swaps required to transfer data through the buffer process seem to outweigh
any value the buffering might have. Per recent discussion and tests.
I modified Bruce's draft patch to use poll() rather than select() where
available (this makes a noticeable difference on my system), and fixed
up the EXEC_BACKEND case.
analyzing, so that future analyze threshold calculations don't get confused.
Also, make sure we correctly track the decrease of live tuples cause by
deletes.
Per report from Dylan Hansen, patches by Tom Lane and me.
changing semantics too much. statement_timestamp is now set immediately
upon receipt of a client command message, and the various places that used
to do their own gettimeofday() calls to mark command startup are referenced
to that instead. I have also made stats_command_string use that same
value for pg_stat_activity.query_start for both the command itself and
its eventual replacement by <IDLE> or <idle in transaction>. There was
some debate about that, but no argument that seemed convincing enough to
justify an extra gettimeofday() call.
current commands; instead, store current-status information in shared
memory. This substantially reduces the overhead of stats_command_string
and also ensures that pg_stat_activity is fully up to date at all times.
Per my recent proposal.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Delay write of pg_stats file to once every five minutes, during
shutdown, or when requested by a backend:
It changes so the file is only written once every 5 minutes (changeable
of course, I just picked something) instead of once every half second.
It's still written when the stats collector shuts down, just as before.
And it is now also written on backend request. A backend requests a
rewrite by simply sending a special stats message. It operates on the
assumption that the backends aren't actually going to read the
statistics file very often, compared to how frequent it's written today.
Magnus Hagander
issued by autovacuum. Add accessor functions to them, and use those in the
pg_stat_*_tables system views.
Catalog version bumped due to changes in the pgstat views and the pgstat file.
Patch from Larry Rosenman, minor improvements by me.
shutdown, or when requested by a backend:
It changes so the file is only written once every 5 minutes (changeable
of course, I just picked something) instead of once every half second.
It's still written when the stats collector shuts down, just as before.
And it is now also written on backend request. A backend requests a
rewrite by simply sending a special stats message. It operates on the
assumption that the backends aren't actually going to read the
statistics file very often, compared to how frequent it's written today.
Magnus Hagander
Per recent discussion, this seems to be making the stats less accurate
rather than more so, particularly on Windows where PID values may be
reused very quickly. Patch by Peter Brant.
files: avoid creating stats hashtable entries for tables that aren't being
touched except by vacuum/analyze, ensure that entries for dropped tables are
removed promptly, and tweak the data layout to avoid storing useless struct
padding. Also improve the performance of pgstat_vacuum_tabstat(), and make
sure that autovacuum invokes it exactly once per autovac cycle rather than
multiple times or not at all. This should cure recent complaints about 8.1
showing much higher stats I/O volume than was seen in 8.0. It'd still be a
good idea to revisit the design with an eye to not re-writing the entire
stats dataset every half second ... but that would be too much to backpatch,
I fear.
an LWLock instead of a spinlock. This hardly matters on Unix machines
but should improve startup performance on Windows (or any port using
EXEC_BACKEND). Per previous discussion.
file. The original code probed the PGPROC array separately for each PID,
which was not good for large numbers of backends: not only is the runtime
O(N^2) but most of it is spent holding ProcArrayLock. Instead, take the
lock just once and copy the active PIDs into an array, then use qsort
and bsearch so that the lookup time is more like O(N log N).
comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory. Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).
Backpatch to 8.1.X.
Alvaro Herrera
Tom Lane
Magnus Hagander
Bruce Momjian
Neil Conway
Peter Eisentraut