Standby servers can now have WALSender processes, which can work with
either WALReceiver or archive_commands to pass data. Fully updated
docs, including new conceptual terms of sending server, upstream and
downstream servers. WALSenders terminated when promote to master.
Fujii Masao, review, rework and doc rewrite by Simon Riggs
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.
The previous functions of assign hooks are now split between check hooks
and assign hooks, where the former can fail but the latter shouldn't.
Aside from being conceptually clearer, this approach exposes the
"canonicalized" form of the variable value to guc.c without having to do
an actual assignment. And that lets us fix the problem recently noted by
Bernd Helmle that the auto-tune patch for wal_buffers resulted in bogus
log messages about "parameter "wal_buffers" cannot be changed without
restarting the server". There may be some speed advantage too, because
this design lets hook functions avoid re-parsing variable values when
restoring a previous state after a rollback (they can store a pre-parsed
representation of the value instead). This patch also resolves a
longstanding annoyance about custom error messages from variable assign
hooks: they should modify, not appear separately from, guc.c's own message
about "invalid parameter value".
This means one less thing to configure when setting up synchronous
replication, and also avoids some ambiguity around what the behavior
should be when the settings of these variables conflict.
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me.
If a smart shutdown occurs just as a child is starting up, and the
child subsequently becomes a walsender, there is a race condition:
the postmaster might count the exstant backends, determine that there
is one normal backend, and wait for it to die off. Had the walsender
transition already occurred before the postmaster counted, it would
have proceeded with the shutdown.
To fix this, have each child that transforms into a walsender kick
the postmaster just after doing so, so that the state machine is
certain to advance.
Fujii Masao
than replication_timeout (a new GUC) milliseconds. The TCP timeout is often
too long, you want the master to notice a dead connection much sooner.
People complained about that in 9.0 too, but with synchronous replication
it's even more important to notice dead connections promptly.
Fujii Masao and Heikki Linnakangas
It originally worked this way, but was changed by commit
a8a8a3e096, since which time it's been impossible
for walreceiver to ever send a reply with write_location and flush_location
set to different values.
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.
1. Don't ignore query cancel interrupts. Instead, if the user asks to
cancel the query after we've already committed it, but before it's on
the standby, just emit a warning and let the COMMIT finish.
2. Don't ignore die interrupts (pg_terminate_backend or fast shutdown).
Instead, emit a warning message and close the connection without
acknowledging the commit. Other backends will still see the effect of
the commit, but there's no getting around that; it's too late to abort
at this point, and ignoring die interrupts altogether doesn't seem like
a good idea.
3. If synchronous_standby_names becomes empty, wake up all backends
waiting for synchronous replication to complete. Without this, someone
attempting to shut synchronous replication off could easily wedge the
entire system instead.
4. Avoid depending on the assumption that if a walsender updates
MyProc->syncRepState, we'll see the change even if we read it without
holding the lock. The window for this appears to be quite narrow (and
probably doesn't exist at all on machines with strong memory ordering)
but protecting against it is practically free, so do that.
5. Remove useless state SYNC_REP_MUST_DISCONNECT, which isn't needed and
doesn't actually do anything.
There's still some further work needed here to make the behavior of fast
shutdown plausible, but that looks complex, so I'm leaving it for a
separate commit. Review by Fujii Masao.
It's not a good idea to kill the postmaster just because someone muffs
this, and it's not consistent with what we do for other, similar GUCs.
Fujii Masao, with a bit more hacking by me
SyncRepRequested() must check not only the value of the
synchronous_replication GUC but also whether max_wal_senders > 0.
Otherwise, we might end up waiting for sync rep even when there's no
possibility of a standby ever managing to connect. There are some
existing cross-checks to prevent this, but they're not quite sufficient:
the user can start the server with max_wal_senders=0,
synchronous_standby_names='', and synchronous_replication=off and then
subsequent make synchronous_standby_names not empty using pg_ctl reload,
and then SET synchronous_standby=on, leading to an indefinite hang.
Along the way, rename the global variable for the synchronous_replication
GUC to match the name of the GUC itself, for clarity.
Report by Fujii Masao, though I didn't use his patch.
If a standby is broadcasting reply messages and we have named
one or more standbys in synchronous_standby_names then allow
users who set synchronous_replication to wait for commit, which
then provides strict data integrity guarantees. Design avoids
sending and receiving transaction state information so minimises
bookkeeping overheads. We synchronize with the highest priority
standby that is connected and ready to synchronize. Other standbys
can be defined to takeover in case of standby failure.
This version has very strict behaviour; more relaxed options
may be added at a later date.
Simon Riggs and Fujii Masao, with reviews by Yeb Havinga, Jaime
Casanova, Heikki Linnakangas and Robert Haas, plus the assistance
of many other design reviewers.
it a lot more useful for determining which standby is most up-to-date,
for example. There was long discussions on whether overwriting existing
existing WAL makes sense to begin with, and whether we should do some more
extensive variable renaming, but this change nevertheless seems quite
uncontroversial.
Fujii Masao, reviewed by Jeff Janes, Robert Haas, Stephen Frost.
Without this patch, when wal_receiver_status_interval=0, indicating that no
status messages should be sent, Hot Standby feedback messages are instead sent
extremely frequently.
Fujii Masao, with documentation changes by me.
Standby optionally sends back information about oldestXmin of queries
which is then checked and applied to the WALSender's proc->xmin.
GetOldestXmin() is modified slightly to agree with GetSnapshotData(),
so that all backends on primary include WALSender within their snapshots.
Note this does nothing to change the snapshot xmin on either master or
standby. Feedback piggybacks on the standby reply message.
vacuum_defer_cleanup_age is no longer used on standby, though parameter
still exists on primary, since some use cases still exist.
Simon Riggs, review comments from Fujii Masao, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
the standby has written, flushed, and applied the WAL. At the moment, this
is for informational purposes only, the values are only shown in
pg_stat_replication system view, but in the future they will also be needed
for synchronous replication.
Extracted from Simon riggs' synchronous replication patch by Robert Haas, with
some tweaking by me.
Specifying this option makes the server not wait for the
xlog to be archived, or emit a warning that it can't,
instead leaving the responsibility with the client.
This is useful when the log is being streamed using
the streaming protocol in parallel with the backup,
without having log archiving enabled.
Add the current xlog insert location to the response of
IDENTIFY_SYSTEM, and adds result sets containing start
and stop location of backups to BASE_BACKUP responses.
With this patch, pg_basebackup doesn't write a backup_label file in the
data directory, so it doesn't interfere with a pg_start/stop_backup() based
backup anymore. backup_label is still included in the backup, but it is
injected directly into the tar stream.
Heikki Linnakangas, reviewed by Fujii Masao and Magnus Hagander.
When included, this makes the base backup a complete working
"clone" of the initial database, ready to have a postmaster
started against it without the need to set up any log archiving
or similar.
Magnus Hagander, reviewed by Fujii Masao and Heikki Linnakangas
While doing this, also move base backup options into
a struct instead of increasing the number of parameters
to multiple functions for each new option.
Simon Riggs
Heikki Linnakangas
Peter Eisentraut
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Robert Haas
Itagaki Takahiro
Magnus Hagander