When archive recovery and restartpoints were initially introduced,
checkpoint_segments was ignored on the grounds that the files restored from
archive don't consume any space in the recovery server. That was changed in
later releases, but even then it was arguably a feature rather than a bug,
as performing restartpoints as often as checkpoints during normal operation
might be excessive, but you might nevertheless not want to waste a lot of
space for pre-allocated WAL by setting checkpoint_segments to a high value.
But now that we have separate min_wal_size and max_wal_size settings, you
can bound WAL usage with max_wal_size, and still avoid consuming excessive
space usage by setting min_wal_size to a lower value, so that argument is
moot.
There are still some issues with actually limiting the space usage to
max_wal_size: restartpoints in recovery can only start after seeing the
checkpoint record, while a checkpoint starts flushing buffers as soon as
the redo-pointer is set. Restartpoint is paced to happen at the same
leisurily speed, determined by checkpoint_completion_target, as checkpoints,
but because they are started later, max_wal_size can be exceeded by upto
one checkpoint cycle's worth of WAL, depending on
checkpoint_completion_target. But that seems better than not trying at all,
and max_wal_size is a soft limit anyway.
The documentation already claimed that max_wal_size is obeyed in recovery,
so this just fixes the behaviour to match the docs. However, add some
weasel-words there to mention that max_wal_size may well be exceeded by
some amount in recovery.
The introduction of min_wal_size & max_wal_size in 88e9823026 makes it
feasible to increase the default upper bound in checkpoint
size. Previously raising the default would lead to a increased disk
footprint, even if more segments weren't beneficial. The low default of
checkpoint size is one of common performance problem users have thus
increasing the default makes sense. Setups where the increase in
maximum disk usage is a problem will very likely have to run with a
modified configuration anyway.
Discussion: 54F4EFB8.40202@agliodbs.com,
CA+TgmoZEAgX5oMGJOHVj8L7XOkAe05Gnf45rP40m-K3FhZRVKg@mail.gmail.com
Author: Josh Berkus, after a discussion involving lots of people.
Instead of having a single knob (checkpoint_segments) that both triggers
checkpoints, and determines how many checkpoints to recycle, they are now
separate concerns. There is still an internal variable called
CheckpointSegments, which triggers checkpoints. But it no longer determines
how many segments to recycle at a checkpoint. That is now auto-tuned by
keeping a moving average of the distance between checkpoints (in bytes),
and trying to keep that many segments in reserve. The advantage of this is
that you can set max_wal_size very high, but the system won't actually
consume that much space if there isn't any need for it. The min_wal_size
sets a floor for that; you can effectively disable the auto-tuning behavior
by setting min_wal_size equal to max_wal_size.
The max_wal_size setting is now the actual target size of WAL at which a
new checkpoint is triggered, instead of the distance between checkpoints.
Previously, you could calculate the actual WAL usage with the formula
"(2 + checkpoint_completion_target) * checkpoint_segments + 1". With this
patch, you set the desired WAL usage with max_wal_size, and the system
calculates the appropriate CheckpointSegments with the reverse of that
formula. That's a lot more intuitive for administrators to set.
Reviewed by Amit Kapila and Venkata Balaji N.
xlog.c is huge, this makes it a little bit smaller, which is nice. Functions
related to putting together the WAL record are in xloginsert.c, and the
lower level stuff for managing WAL buffers and such are in xlog.c.
Also move the definition of XLogRecord to a separate header file. This
causes churn in the #includes of all the files that write WAL records, and
redo routines, but it avoids pulling in xlog.h into most places.
Reviewed by Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera, Andres Freund and Amit Kapila.
Add section to the Reliability section about what is and is not protected for
various file types.
Further edits welcome.
Designed to allow 1-2 line change when/if checksums are committed.
Inspired by docs written by Jeff Davis, though completely different from his
patch.
Clarify the docs explaining what commit_delay does, and add a
recommendation about a useful value for it, namely half of the single-page
fsync time reported by pg_test_fsync. This is informed by testing of
the new-in-9.3 implementation of commit_delay; in prior versions it
was far harder to arrive at a useful setting.
In passing, do some wordsmithing and markup-fixing in the same general
area.
Also, change pg_test_fsync's default time-per-test from 2 seconds to 5.
The old value was about the minimum at which the results could be taken
seriously at all, and so seems a tad optimistic as a default.
Peter Geoghegan, reviewed by Noah Misch; some additional editing by me
This hasn't been true since 9.1, when the default was changed to -1.
Remove the reference completely, keeping the discussion of the parameter
and it's shared memory effects on the config page.
Instead of letting every backend participating in a group commit wait
independently, have the first one that becomes ready to flush WAL wait
for the configured delay, and let all the others wait just long enough
for that first process to complete its flush. This greatly increases
the chances of being able to configure a commit_delay setting that
actually improves performance.
As a side consequence of this change, commit_delay now affects all WAL
flushes, rather than just commits. There was some discussion on
pgsql-hackers about whether to rename the GUC to, say, wal_flush_delay,
but in the absence of consensus I am leaving it alone for now.
Peter Geoghegan, with some changes, mostly to the documentation, by me.
Recent versions of the Linux system header files cause xlogdefs.h to
believe that open_datasync should be the default sync method, whereas
formerly fdatasync was the default on Linux. open_datasync is a bad
choice, first because it doesn't actually outperform fdatasync (in fact
the reverse), and second because we try to use O_DIRECT with it, causing
failures on certain filesystems (e.g., ext4 with data=journal option).
This part of the patch is largely per a proposal from Marti Raudsepp.
More extensive changes are likely to follow in HEAD, but this is as much
change as we want to back-patch.
Also clean up confusing code and incorrect documentation surrounding the
fsync_writethrough option. Those changes shouldn't result in any actual
behavioral change, but I chose to back-patch them anyway to keep the
branches looking similar in this area.
In 9.0 and HEAD, also do some copy-editing on the WAL Reliability
documentation section.
Back-patch to all supported branches, since any of them might get used
on modern Linux versions.
In particular, we are now more explicit about the fact that you may need
wal_sync_method=fsync_writethrough for crash-safety on some platforms,
including MaxOS X. There's also now an explicit caution against assuming
that the default setting of wal_sync_method is either crash-safe or best
for performance.
Heikki Linnakangas
Andres Freund
Magnus Hagander
Peter Eisentraut
Bruce Momjian
Simon Riggs
Tom Lane
Robert Haas