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.
Users of asynchronous-commit mode expect there to be a guaranteed maximum
delay before an async commit's WAL records get flushed to disk. The
original version of the walwriter hibernation patch broke that. Add an
extra shared-memory flag to allow async commits to kick the walwriter out
of hibernation mode, without adding any noticeable overhead in cases where
no action is needed.
Latch-ify the stats collector, so that it does not need an arbitrary wakeup
cycle to check for postmaster death. The incremental savings in idle power
is pretty marginal, since we only had it waking every two seconds; but I
believe that this patch may also improve the collector's performance under
load, by reducing the number of kernel calls made per message when messages
are arriving constantly (we now avoid a select/poll call except when we
need to sleep). The change also reduces the time needed for a normal
database shutdown on platforms where signals don't interrupt select().
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
This patch adjusts the core statistics views to match the decision already
taken for pg_stat_statements, that values representing elapsed time should
be represented as float8 and measured in milliseconds. By using float8,
we are no longer tied to a specific maximum precision of timing data.
(Internally, it's still microseconds, but we could now change that without
needing changes at the SQL level.)
The columns affected are
pg_stat_bgwriter.checkpoint_write_time
pg_stat_bgwriter.checkpoint_sync_time
pg_stat_database.blk_read_time
pg_stat_database.blk_write_time
pg_stat_user_functions.total_time
pg_stat_user_functions.self_time
pg_stat_xact_user_functions.total_time
pg_stat_xact_user_functions.self_time
The first four of these are new in 9.2, so there is no compatibility issue
from changing them. The others require a release note comment that they
are now double precision (and can show a fractional part) rather than
bigint as before; also their underlying statistics functions now match
the column definitions, instead of returning bigint microseconds.
If it fails to open a new log file, the syslogger assumes there's something
wrong with its parameters (such as log_directory), and stops attempting
automatic time-based or size-based log file rotations. Sending it SIGHUP
is supposed to start that up again. However, the original coding for that
was really bogus, involving clobbering a couple of GUC variables and hoping
that SIGHUP processing would restore them. Get rid of that technique in
favor of maintaining a separate flag showing we've turned rotation off.
Per report from Mark Kirkwood.
Also, the syslogger will automatically attempt to create the log_directory
directory if it doesn't exist, but that was only happening at startup.
For consistency and ease of use, it should do the same whenever the value
of log_directory is changed by SIGHUP.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
We used to only initialize the stack base pointer when starting up a regular
backend, not in other processes. In particular, autovacuum workers can run
arbitrary user code, and without stack-depth checking, infinite recursion
in e.g an index expression will bring down the whole cluster.
The comment about PL/Java using set_stack_base() is not yet true. As the
code stands, PL/java still modifies the stack_base_ptr variable directly.
However, it's been discussed in the PL/Java mailing list that it should be
changed to use the function, because PL/Java is currently oblivious to the
register stack used on Itanium. There's another issues with PL/Java, namely
that the stack base pointer it sets is not really the base of the stack, it
could be something close to the bottom of the stack. That's a separate issue
that might need some further changes to this code, but that's a different
story.
Backpatch to all supported releases.
Ants Aasma's original patch to add timing information for buffer I/O
requests exposed this data at the relation level, which was judged too
costly. I've here exposed it at the database level instead.
The original coding of the syslogger had an arbitrary limit of 20 large
messages concurrently in progress, after which it would just punt and dump
message fragments to the output file separately. Our ambitions are a bit
higher than that now, so allow the data structure to expand as necessary.
Reported and patched by Andrew Dunstan; some editing by Tom
Postmaster sets max_safe_fds by testing how many open file descriptors it
can open, and that is normally inherited by all child processes at fork().
Not so on EXEC_BACKEND, ie. Windows, however. Because of that, we
effectively ignored max_files_per_process on Windows, and always assumed
a conservative default of 32 simultaneous open files. That could have an
impact on performance, if you need to access a lot of different files
in a query. After this patch, the value is passed to child processes by
save/restore_backend_variables() among many other global variables.
It has been like this forever, but given the lack of complaints about it,
I'm not backpatching this.
The postmaster was coded to treat any unexpected exit of the startup
process (i.e., the WAL replay process) as a catastrophic crash, and not try
to restart it. This was OK so long as the startup process could not have
any sibling postmaster children. However, if a hot-standby backend
crashes, we SIGQUIT the startup process along with everything else, and the
resulting exit is hardly "unexpected". Treating it as such meant we failed
to restart a standby server after any child crash at all, not only a crash
of the WAL replay process as intended. Adjust that. Back-patch to 9.0
where hot standby was introduced.
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.
This doesn't do anything useful just yet, but is intended as supporting
infrastructure for allowing sepgsql to sensibly check DROP permissions.
KaiGai Kohei and Robert Haas
Add counters for number and size of temporary files used
for spill-to-disk queries for each database to the
pg_stat_database view.
Tomas Vondra, review by Magnus Hagander
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
This separates the state (running/idle/idleintransaction etc) into
it's own field ("state"), and leaves the query field containing just
query text.
The query text will now mean "current query" when a query is running
and "last query" in other states. Accordingly,the field has been
renamed from current_query to query.
Since backwards compatibility was broken anyway to make that, the procpid
field has also been renamed to pid - along with the same field in
pg_stat_replication for consistency.
Scott Mead and Magnus Hagander, review work from Greg Smith
Force the transaction isolation level to READ COMMITTED in autovacuum
worker and launcher processes. There is no benefit to using a higher
isolation level, and doing so could result in delaying foreground
transactions (or maybe even causing unnecessary serialization failures?).
Noted by Dan Ports.
Also, make sure we disable zero_damaged_pages and statement_timeout in
the autovac launcher, not only workers. Now that the launcher can run
transactions, these settings could affect its behavior, and it seems
like the same arguments apply to the launcher as the workers.
This speeds up snapshot-taking and reduces ProcArrayLock contention.
Also, the PGPROC (and PGXACT) structures used by two-phase commit are
now allocated as part of the main array, rather than in a separate
array, and we keep ProcArray sorted in pointer order. These changes
are intended to minimize the number of cache lines that must be pulled
in to take a snapshot, and testing shows a substantial increase in
performance on both read and write workloads at high concurrencies.
Pavan Deolasee, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
Previously we waited for wal_writer_delay before flushing WAL. Now
we also wake WALWriter as soon as a WAL buffer page has filled.
Significant effect observed on performance of asynchronous commits
by Robert Haas, attributed to the ability to set hint bits on tuples
earlier and so reducing contention caused by clog lookups.
This greatly reduces the WAL volume, especially when the table is narrow.
The overhead of locking the heap page is also reduced. Reduced WAL traffic
also makes it scale a lot better, if you run multiple COPY processes at
the same time.
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
Avoid possibly dumping core when pgstat_track_activity_query_size has a
less-than-default value; avoid uselessly searching for the query string
of a successfully-exited backend; don't bother putting out an ERRDETAIL if
we don't have a query to show; some other minor stylistic improvements.
To avoid minimize risk inside the postmaster, we subject this feature
to a number of significant limitations. We very much wish to avoid
doing any complex processing inside the postmaster, due to the
posssibility that the crashed backend has completely corrupted shared
memory. To that end, no encoding conversion is done; instead, we just
replace anything that doesn't look like an ASCII character with a
question mark. We limit the amount of data copied to 1024 characters,
and carefully sanity check the source of that data. While these
restrictions would doubtless be unacceptable in a general-purpose
logging facility, even this limited facility seems like an improvement
over the status quo ante.
Marti Raudsepp, reviewed by PDXPUG and myself
This is merely an exercise in satisfying pedants, not a bug fix, because
in every case we were checking for failure later with ferror(), or else
there was nothing useful to be done about a failure anyway. Document
the latter cases.
This reverts commit 79b2ee20c8, which proved
to not be very informative; it looks like the "pgstat wait timeout"
warnings in the buildfarm are just a symptom of running on heavily loaded
machines, and there isn't any weird mechanism causing them to appear.
To try to reduce the frequency of buildfarm failures from this effect,
increase PGSTAT_MAX_WAIT_TIME from 5 seconds to 10.
Also, arrange to not send a fresh inquiry message every single time through
the loop, as that seems more likely to cause problems (by swamping the
collector) than fix them. We'll now send an inquiry the first time through
the delay loop, and every 640 msec thereafter.
This addresses only those cases that are easy to fix by adding or
moving a const qualifier or removing an unnecessary cast. There are
many more complicated cases remaining.
We were doing some amazingly complicated things in order to avoid running
the very expensive identify_system_timezone() procedure during GUC
initialization. But there is an obvious fix for that, which is to do it
once during initdb and have initdb install the system-specific default into
postgresql.conf, as it already does for most other GUC variables that need
system-environment-dependent defaults. This means that the timezone (and
log_timezone) settings no longer have any magic behavior in the server.
Per discussion.
As per my recent proposal, this refactors things so that these typedefs and
macros are available in a header that can be included in frontend-ish code.
I also changed various headers that were undesirably including
utils/timestamp.h to include datatype/timestamp.h instead. Unsurprisingly,
this showed that half the system was getting utils/timestamp.h by way of
xlog.h.
No actual code changes here, just header refactoring.
Adds additional test for active walsenders and closes a race
condition for when we failover when a new walsender was connecting.
Reported and fixed bu Fujii Masao. Review by Heikki Linnakangas
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.
This is in hopes of learning more about what causes "pgstat wait timeout"
warnings in the buildfarm. This patch should probably be reverted once
we've learned what we can. As coded, it will result in regression test
"failures" at half the delay that the existing code does, so I expect
to see a few more than before.
In pursuit of this (and with the expectation that WaitLatch will be needed
in more places), convert the latch field that was already added to PGPROC
for sync rep into a generic latch that is activated for all PGPROC-owning
processes, and change many of the standard backend signal handlers to set
that latch when a signal happens. This will allow WaitLatch callers to be
wakened properly by these signals.
In passing, fix a whole bunch of signal handlers that had been hacked to do
things that might change errno, without adding the necessary save/restore
logic for errno. Also make some minor fixes in unix_latch.c, and clean
up bizarre and unsafe scheme for disowning the process's latch. Much of
this has to be back-patched into 9.1.
Peter Geoghegan, with additional work by Tom
The original definition had the problem that timeouts exceeding about 2100
seconds couldn't be specified on 32-bit machines. Milliseconds seem like
sufficient resolution, and finer grain than that would be fantasy anyway
on many platforms.
Back-patch to 9.1 so that this aspect of the latch API won't change between
9.1 and later releases.
Peter Geoghegan
Instead of entering them on transaction startup, we materialize them
only when someone wants to wait, which will occur only during CREATE
INDEX CONCURRENTLY. In Hot Standby mode, the startup process must also
be able to probe for conflicting VXID locks, but the lock need never be
fully materialized, because the startup process does not use the normal
lock wait mechanism. Since most VXID locks never need to touch the
lock manager partition locks, this can significantly reduce blocking
contention on read-heavy workloads.
Patch by me. Review by Jeff Davis.
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
When an AccessShareLock, RowShareLock, or RowExclusiveLock is requested
on an unshared database relation, and we can verify that no conflicting
locks can possibly be present, record the lock in a per-backend queue,
stored within the PGPROC, rather than in the primary lock table. This
eliminates a great deal of contention on the lock manager LWLocks.
This patch also refactors the interface between GetLockStatusData() and
pg_lock_status() to be a bit more abstract, so that we don't rely so
heavily on the lock manager's internal representation details. The new
fast path lock structures don't have a LOCK or PROCLOCK structure to
return, so we mustn't depend on that for purposes of listing outstanding
locks.
Review by Jeff Davis.
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.
postmaster.log", or nohup.
There was a small issue with LINUX_OOM_ADJ and silent_mode, namely that with
silent_mode the postmaster process incorrectly used the OOM settings meant
for backend processes. We certainly could've fixed that directly, but since
silent_mode was redundant anyway, we might as well just remove it.
When we added the ability for vacuum to skip heap pages by consulting the
visibility map, we made it just not update the reltuples/relpages
statistics if it skipped any pages. But this could leave us with extremely
out-of-date stats for a table that contains any unchanging areas,
especially for TOAST tables which never get processed by ANALYZE. In
particular this could result in autovacuum making poor decisions about when
to process the table, as in recent report from Florian Helmberger. And in
general it's a bad idea to not update the stats at all. Instead, use the
previous values of reltuples/relpages as an estimate of the tuple density
in unvisited pages. This approach results in a "moving average" estimate
of reltuples, which should converge to the correct value over multiple
VACUUM and ANALYZE cycles even when individual measurements aren't very
good.
This new method for updating reltuples is used by both VACUUM and ANALYZE,
with the result that we no longer need the grotty interconnections that
caused ANALYZE to not update the stats depending on what had happened
in the parent VACUUM command.
Also, fix the logic for skipping all-visible pages during VACUUM so that it
looks ahead rather than behind to decide what to do, as per a suggestion
from Greg Stark. This eliminates useless scanning of all-visible pages at
the start of the relation or just after a not-all-visible page. In
particular, the first few pages of the relation will not be invariably
included in the scanned pages, which seems to help in not overweighting
them in the reltuples estimate.
Back-patch to 8.4, where the visibility map was introduced.
This option turns off autovacuum, prevents non-super-user connections,
and enables oid setting hooks in the backend. The code continues to use
the old autoavacuum disable settings for servers with earlier catalog
versions.
This includes a catalog version bump to identify servers that support
the -b option.
Also avoid hardcoding the current default state by giving it the name
"on" and replace with a meaningful name that reflects its behaviour.
Coding only, no change in behaviour.
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
This is no longer necessary, and might result in a situation where the
configuration file is reloaded (and everything seems OK) but a subsequent
restart of the database fails.
Per an observation from Fujii Masao.
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.
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.
Tracks one counter for each database, which is reset whenever
the statistics for any individual object inside the database is
reset, and one counter for the background writer.
Tomas Vondra, reviewed by Greg Smith
Waiting for relation locks can lead to starvation - it pins down an
autovacuum worker for as long as the lock is held. But if we're doing
an anti-wraparound vacuum, then we still wait; maintenance can no longer
be put off.
To assist with troubleshooting, if log_autovacuum_min_duration >= 0,
we log whenever an autovacuum or autoanalyze is skipped for this reason.
Per a gripe by Josh Berkus, and ensuing discussion.
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
The previous coding treated anything that wasn't an autovacuum launcher
as a normal backend, which is wrong now that we also have WAL senders.
Fujii Masao, reviewed by Robert Haas, Alvaro Herrera, Tom Lane,
and Bernd Helmle.
Fix broken test for pre-existing postmaster, caused by wrong code for
appending lines to the lockfile; don't write a failed listen_address
setting into the lockfile; don't arbitrarily change the location of the
data directory in the lockfile compared to previous releases; provide more
consistent and useful definitions of the socket path and listen_address
entries; avoid assuming that pg_ctl has the same DEFAULT_PGSOCKET_DIR as
the postmaster; assorted code style improvements.
We don't actually need optreset, because we can easily fix the code to
ensure that it's cleanly restartable after having completed a scan over the
argv array; which is the only case we need to restart in. Getting rid of
it avoids a class of interactions with the system libraries and allows
reversion of my change of yesterday in postmaster.c and postgres.c.
Back-patch to 8.4. Before that the getopt code was a bit different anyway.
The mingw people don't appear to care about compatibility with non-GNU
versions of getopt, so force use of our own copy of getopt on Windows.
Also, ensure that we make use of optreset when using our own copy.
Per report from Andrew Dunstan. Back-patch to all versions supported
on Windows.
This commit replaces pg_class.relistemp with pg_class.relpersistence;
and also modifies the RangeVar node type to carry relpersistence rather
than istemp. It also removes removes rd_istemp from RelationData and
instead performs the correct computation based on relpersistence.
For clarity, we add three new macros: RelationNeedsWAL(),
RelationUsesLocalBuffers(), and RelationUsesTempNamespace(), so that we
can clarify the purpose of each check that previous depended on
rd_istemp.
This is intended as infrastructure for the upcoming unlogged tables
patch, as well as for future possible work on global temporary tables.
We were failing to zero out some pg_stat_database counters that have
been added since the initial pgstats coding. This is a bug, but not
back-patching the fix since changing this behavior in a minor release
seems a cure worse than the disease.
Report and patch by Tomas Vondra.
Purely cosmetic patch to make our coding standards more consistent ---
we were doing symbolic some places and octal other places. This patch
fixes all C-coded uses of mkdir, chmod, and umask. There might be some
other calls I missed. Inconsistency noted while researching tablespace
directory permissions issue.
When using default autovacuum_vac_cost_limit, autovac_balance_cost relied
on VacuumCostLimit to contain the correct global value ... but after the
first time through in a particular worker process, it didn't, because we'd
trashed it in previous iterations. Depending on the state of other autovac
workers, this could result in a steady reduction of the effective
cost_limit setting as a particular worker processed more and more tables,
causing it to go slower and slower. Spotted by Simon Poole (bug #5759).
Fix by saving and restoring the GUC variables in the loop in do_autovacuum.
In passing, improve a few comments.
Back-patch to 8.3 ... the cost rebalancing code has been buggy since it was
put in.
The handle to the shared memory segment containing startup
parameters was sent as 32-bit even on 64-bit systems. Since
HANDLEs appear to be allocated sequentially this shouldn't
be a problem until we reach 2^32 open handles in the postmaster,
but a 64-bit value should be sent across as 64-bit, and not
zero out the top 32 bits.
Noted by Tom Lane.
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.
We must not return any "okay to proceed" result code without having checked
for too many children, else we might fail later on when trying to add the
new child to one of the per-child state arrays. It's not clear whether
this oversight explains Stefan Kaltenbrunner's recent report, but it could
certainly produce a similar symptom.
Back-patch to 8.4; the logic was not broken before that.
get_database_list was uselessly allocating its output data, along some
created along the way, in a permanent memory context. This didn't
matter when autovacuum was a single, short-lived process, but now that
the launcher is permanent, it shows up as a permanent leak.
To fix, make get_database list allocate its output data in the caller's
context, which is in charge of freeing it when appropriate; and the
memory leaked by heap_beginscan et al is allocated in a throwaway
transaction context.
We may as well make pgstat_count_heap_scan() and related macros just count
whenever rel->pgstat_info isn't null. Testing pgstat_track_counts buys
nothing at all in the normal case where that flag is ON; and when it's OFF,
the pgstat_info link will be null, so it's still a useless test.
This change is unlikely to buy any noticeable performance improvement,
but a cycle shaved is a cycle earned; and my investigations earlier today
convinced me that we're down to the point where individual instructions in
the inner execution loops are starting to matter.
since it can happen when a process fails to start when the system
is under high load.
Per several bug reports and many peoples investigation.
Back-patch to 8.4, which is as far back as the "deadman-switch"
for shared memory access exists.
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.
statistics counts. These numbers are being accumulated but haven't yet been
transmitted to the collector (and won't be, until the transaction ends).
For some purposes, though, it's handy to be able to look at them.
Joel Jacobson, reviewed by Itagaki Takahiro
Normally, we automatically restart after a backend crash, but in some
cases when PostgreSQL is invoked by clusterware it may be desirable to
suppress this behavior, so we provide an option which does this.
Since no existing GUC group quite fits, create a new group called
"error handling options" for this and the previously undocumented GUC
exit_on_error, which is now documented.
Review by Fujii Masao.
log files created by the syslogger process.
In passing, make unix_file_permissions display its value in octal, same
as log_file_mode now does.
Martin Pihlak
In particular, it's bad to start walreceiver when in state
PM_WAIT_BACKENDS, because we have no provision to kill walreceiver
when in that state.
Fujii Masao
1. If we receive a fast shutdown request while in the PM_STARTUP state,
process it just as we would in PM_RECOVERY, PM_HOT_STANDBY, or PM_RUN.
Without this change, an early fast shutdown followed by Hot Standby causes
the database to get stuck in a state where a shutdown is pending (so no new
connections are allowed) but the shutdown request is never processed unless
we end Hot Standby and enter normal running.
2. Avoid removing the backup label file when a smart or fast shutdown occurs
during recovery. It makes sense to do this once we've reached normal running,
since we must be taking a backup which now won't be valid. But during
recovery we must be recovering from a previously taken backup, and any backup
label file is needed to restart recovery from the right place.
Fujii Masao and Robert Haas
archive_command) as soon as possible, namely just before issuing a new call
of archive_command, even when there is a backlog of files to be archived.
The original coding would only absorb new settings after clearing the backlog
and returning to the outer loop. Per discussion.
Back-patch to 8.3. The logic in prior versions is a bit different and it
doesn't seem worth taking any risks of breaking it.
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.
archival or hot standby should be WAL-logged, instead of deducing that from
other options like archive_mode. This replaces recovery_connections GUC in
the primary, where it now has no effect, but it's still used in the standby
to enable/disable hot standby.
Remove the WAL-logging of "unlogged operations", like creating an index
without WAL-logging and fsyncing it at the end. Instead, we keep a copy of
the wal_mode setting and the settings that affect how much shared memory a
hot standby server needs to track master transactions (max_connections,
max_prepared_xacts, max_locks_per_xact) in pg_control. Whenever the settings
change, at server restart, write a WAL record noting the new settings and
update pg_control. This allows us to notice the change in those settings in
the standby at the right moment, they used to be included in checkpoint
records, but that meant that a changed value was not reflected in the
standby until the first checkpoint after the change.
Bump PG_CONTROL_VERSION and XLOG_PAGE_MAGIC. Whack XLOG_PAGE_MAGIC back to
the sequence it used to follow, before hot standby and subsequent patches
changed it to 0x9003.
reload and rotation signals, and a helper thread reads messages from the
pipe and writes them to the log file. However, server code isn't generally
thread-safe, so if both try to do e.g palloc()/pfree() at the same time,
bad things will happen. To fix that, use a critical section (which is like
a mutex) to enforce that only one the threads are active at a time.
At present, killing the startup process does not release any locks it holds,
so we must wait to stop the startup and walreceiver processes until all
read-only backends have exited. Without this patch, the startup and
walreceiver processes never exit, so the server gets permanently stuck in
a half-shutdown state.
Fujii Masao, with review, docs, and comment adjustments by me.
Windows, thanks to a feature in CRT called Parameter Validation.
Backpatch to 8.2, which is the oldest version supported on Windows. In
8.2 and 8.3 also backpatch the earlier change to use DEVNULL instead of
NULL_DEV #define for a /dev/null-like device. NULL_DEV was hard-coded to
"/dev/null" regardless of platform, which didn't work on Windows, while
DEVNULL works on all platforms. Restarting syslogger didn't work on
Windows on versions 8.3 and below because of that.
unable to read a stats file for reasons other than ENOENT, and having to reset
last_statrequest because it's later than current time in the collector.
Not clear if this will shed any light on the "pgstat wait timeout" business,
but it seems like a good idea in general.
In passing, do some message-style-police work on recently-added
pgstat_reset_shared_counters code.
The purpose of this change is to eliminate the need for every caller
of SearchSysCache, SearchSysCacheCopy, SearchSysCacheExists,
GetSysCacheOid, and SearchSysCacheList to know the maximum number
of allowable keys for a syscache entry (currently 4). This will
make it far easier to increase the maximum number of keys in a
future release should we choose to do so, and it makes the code
shorter, too.
Design and review by Tom Lane.
restore_command, if the connection to the primary server is lost. This
ensures that the standby can recover automatically, if the connection is
lost for a long time and standby falls behind so much that the required
WAL segments have been archived and deleted in the master.
This also makes standby_mode useful without streaming replication; the
server will keep retrying restore_command every few seconds until the
trigger file is found. That's the same basic functionality pg_standby
offers, but without the bells and whistles.
To implement that, refactor the ReadRecord/FetchRecord functions. The
FetchRecord() function introduced in the original streaming replication
patch is removed, and all the retry logic is now in a new function called
XLogReadPage(). XLogReadPage() is now responsible for executing
restore_command, launching walreceiver, and waiting for new WAL to arrive
from primary, as required.
This also changes the life cycle of walreceiver. When launched, it now only
tries to connect to the master once, and exits if the connection fails, or
is lost during streaming for any reason. The startup process detects the
death, and re-launches walreceiver if necessary.
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 silences some warnings on Win64. Not using the proper SOCKET datatype
was actually wrong on Win32 as well, but didn't cause any warnings there.
Also create define PGINVALID_SOCKET to indicate an invalid/non-existing
socket, instead of using a hardcoded -1 value.
decisions about when to auto-analyze.
The previous code depended on n_live_tuples + n_dead_tuples - last_anl_tuples,
where all three of these numbers could be bad estimates from ANALYZE itself.
Even worse, in the presence of a steady flow of HOT updates and matching
HOT-tuple reclamations, auto-analyze might never trigger at all, even if all
three numbers are exactly right, because n_dead_tuples could hold steady.
To fix, replace last_anl_tuples with an accurately tracked count of the total
number of committed tuple inserts + updates + deletes since the last ANALYZE
on the table. This can still be compared to the same threshold as before, but
it's much more trustworthy than the old computation. Tracking this requires
one more intra-transaction counter per modified table within backends, but no
additional memory space in the stats collector. There probably isn't any
measurable speed difference; if anything it might be a bit faster than before,
since I was able to eliminate some per-tuple arithmetic operations in favor of
adding sums once per (sub)transaction.
Also, simplify the logic around pgstat vacuum and analyze reporting messages
by not trying to fold VACUUM ANALYZE into a single pgstat message.
The original thought behind this patch was to allow scheduling of analyzes
on parent tables by artificially inflating their changes_since_analyze count.
I've left that for a separate patch since this change seems to stand on its
own merit.
The temporary hash tables made by pgstat_collect_oids should be allocated
in a short-term memory context, which is not the default behavior of
hash_create. Noted while looking through hash_create calls in connection
with Robert Haas' recent complaint.
This is a pre-existing bug, but it doesn't seem important enough to
back-patch. The hash table is not so large that it would matter unless this
happened many times within a session, which seems quite unlikely.
Enabled by recovery_connections = on (default) and forcing archive recovery using a recovery.conf. Recovery processing now emulates the original transactions as they are replayed, providing full locking and MVCC behaviour for read only queries. Recovery must enter consistent state before connections are allowed, so there is a delay, typically short, before connections succeed. Replay of recovering transactions can conflict and in some cases deadlock with queries during recovery; these result in query cancellation after max_standby_delay seconds have expired. Infrastructure changes have minor effects on normal running, though introduce four new types of WAL record.
New test mode "make standbycheck" allows regression tests of static command behaviour on a standby server while in recovery. Typical and extreme dynamic behaviours have been checked via code inspection and manual testing. Few port specific behaviours have been utilised, though primary testing has been on Linux only so far.
This commit is the basic patch. Additional changes will follow in this release to enhance some aspects of behaviour, notably improved handling of conflicts, deadlock detection and query cancellation. Changes to VACUUM FULL are also required.
Simon Riggs, with significant and lengthy review by Heikki Linnakangas, including streamlined redesign of snapshot creation and two-phase commit.
Important contributions from Florian Pflug, Mark Kirkwood, Merlin Moncure, Greg Stark, Gianni Ciolli, Gabriele Bartolini, Hannu Krosing, Robert Haas, Tatsuo Ishii, Hiroyuki Yamada plus support and feedback from many other community members.
output filename if CSV logging was enabled and only one of the two possible
output files got rotated during a particular call (which would, in fact,
typically be the case during a size-based rotation). This would amount to
about MAXPGPATH (1KB) per rotation, and it's been there since the CSV
code was put in, so it's surprising that nobody noticed it before.
Per bug #5196 from Thomas Poindessous.
adopted for EXPLAIN. This will allow additional options to be implemented
in future without having to make them fully-reserved keywords. The old syntax
remains available for existing options, however.
Itagaki Takahiro
build actually attempts to advertise itself via Bonjour. Formerly it always
did so, which meant that packagers had to decide for their users whether
this behavior was wanted or not. The default is "off" to be on the safe
side, though this represents a change in the default behavior of a
Bonjour-enabled build. Per discussion.
with the not-so-deprecated DNSServiceRegister. This patch shouldn't change
any user-visible behavior, it just gets rid of a deprecation warning in
--with-bonjour builds. The new code will fail on OS X releases before 10.3,
but it seems unlikely that anyone will want to run Postgres 8.5 on 10.2.
Formerly, these message types would be discarded unless there was already
a stats hash table entry for the target table. However, the intent of
saving hash table space for unused tables was subverted by the fact that
the physical I/O done by the vacuum or analyze would result in an immediately
following tabstat message, which would create the hash table entry anyway.
All that we had left was surprising loss of statistical data, as in a recent
complaint from Jaime Casanova.
It seems unlikely that a real database would have many tables that go totally
untouched over the long haul, so the consensus is that this "optimization"
serves little purpose anyhow. Remove it, and just create the hash table
entry on demand in all cases.
via the "flat files" facility. This requires making it enough like a backend
to be able to run transactions; it's no longer an "auxiliary process" but
more like the autovacuum worker processes. Also, its signal handling has
to be brought into line with backends/workers. In particular, since it
now has to handle procsignal.c processing, the special autovac-launcher-only
signal conditions are moved to SIGUSR2.
Alvaro, with some cleanup from Tom
(That flat file is now completely useless, but removal will come later.)
To do this, postpone client authentication into the startup transaction
that's run by InitPostgres. We still collect the startup packet and do
SSL initialization (if needed) at the same time we did before. The
AuthenticationTimeout is applied separately to startup packet collection
and the actual authentication cycle. (This is a bit annoying, since it
means a couple extra syscalls; but the signal handling requirements inside
and outside a transaction are sufficiently different that it seems best
to treat the timeouts as completely independent.)
A small security disadvantage is that if the given database name is invalid,
this will be reported to the client before any authentication happens.
We could work around that by connecting to database "postgres" instead,
but consensus seems to be that it's not worth introducing such surprising
behavior.
Processing of all command-line switches and GUC options received from the
client is now postponed until after authentication. This means that
PostAuthDelay is much less useful than it used to be --- if you need to
investigate problems during InitPostgres you'll have to set PreAuthDelay
instead. However, allowing an unauthenticated user to set any GUC options
whatever seems a bit too risky, so we'll live with that.
PostgresMain switch. In point of fact, FrontendProtocol is already set
in a backend process, since ProcessStartupPacket() is executed inside
the backend --- it hasn't been run by the postmaster for many years.
And if it were, we'd still certainly want FrontendProtocol to be set before
we get as far as PostgresMain, so that startup errors get reported in the
right protocol.
-v might have some future use in standalone backends, so I didn't go so
far as to remove the switch outright.
Also, initialize FrontendProtocol to 0 not PG_PROTOCOL_LATEST. The only
likely result of presetting it like that is to mask failure-to-set-it
mistakes.
In the original coding, setting a single reloption would cause default
values to be used for all the other reloptions. This is a problem
particularly for autovacuum reloptions.
Itagaki Takahiro
Instead of sending stdout/stderr to /dev/null after forking away from the
terminal, send them to postmaster.log within the data directory. Since
this opens the door to indefinite logfile bloat, recommend even more
strongly that log output be redirected when using silent_mode.
Move the postmaster's initial calls of load_hba() and load_ident() down
to after we have started the log collector, if we are going to. This
is so that errors reported by them will appear in the "usual" place.
Reclassify silent_mode as a LOGGING_WHERE, not LOGGING_WHEN, parameter,
since it's got absolutely nothing to do with the latter category.
In passing, fix some obsolete references to -S ... this option hasn't
had that switch letter for a long time.
Back-patch to 8.4, since as of 8.4 load_hba() and load_ident() are more
picky (and thus more likely to fail) than they used to be. This entire
change was driven by a complaint about those errors disappearing into
the bit bucket.
This causes problems when the system load is high, per report from Zdenek
Kotala in <1250860954.1239.114.camel@localhost>; instead of calling kill
directly, have the signal handler set a flag which is checked in ServerLoop.
This way, the handler can return before being called again by a subsequent
signal sent from the autovacuum launcher. Also, increase the sleep in the
launcher in this failure path to 1 second.
Backpatch to 8.3, which is when the signalling between autovacuum
launcher/postmaster was introduced.
Also, add a couple of ReleasePostmasterChildSlot calls in error paths; this
part backpatched to 8.4 which is when the child slot stuff was introduced.
To make this work in the base case, pg_database now has a nailed-in-cache
relation descriptor that is initialized using hardwired knowledge in
relcache.c. This means pg_database is added to the set of relations that
need to have a Schema_pg_xxx macro maintained in pg_attribute.h. When this
path is taken, we'll have to do a seqscan of pg_database to find the row
we need.
In the normal case, we are able to do an indexscan to find the database's row
by name. This is made possible by storing a global relcache init file that
describes only the shared catalogs and their indexes (and therefore is usable
by all backends in any database). A new backend loads this cache file,
finds its database OID after an indexscan on pg_database, and then loads
the local relcache init file for that database.
This change should effectively eliminate number of databases as a factor
in backend startup time, even with large numbers of databases. However,
the real reason for doing it is as a first step towards getting rid of
the flat files altogether. There are still several other sub-projects
to be tackled before that can happen.
if a smart shutdown is already in progress. Backpatch to 8.3, this was broken
in the patch that introduced "dead-end backends".
Per report by Itagaki Takahiro, patch by Fujii Masao.
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
that memory allocated by starting third party DLLs doesn't end up
conflicting with it.
Hopefully this solves the long-time issue with "could not reattach
to shared memory" errors on Win32.
Patch from Tsutomu Yamada and me, based on idea from Trevor Talbot.
LC_CTYPE settings to children via BackendParameters. Per discussion,
the postmaster is now just using system defaults anyway, so we might as
well save a few cycles during backend startup.
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.
behavior in cases where we don't know the heap tuple count accurately; in
particular partial vacuum, but this also makes the API a bit more useful
for ANALYZE. This patch adds "estimated_count" flags to both structs so
that an approximate count can be flagged as such, and adjusts the logic
so that approximate counts are not used for updating pg_class.reltuples.
This fixes my previous complaint that VACUUM was putting ridiculous values
into pg_class.reltuples for indexes. The actual impact of that bug is
limited, because the planner only pays attention to reltuples for an index
if the index is partial; which probably explains why beta testers hadn't
noticed a degradation in plan quality from it. But it needs to be fixed.
The whole thing is a bit messy and should be redesigned in future, because
reltuples now has the potential to drift quite far away from reality when
a long period elapses with no non-partial vacuums. But this is as good as
it's going to get for 8.4.
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.
a backend has done exit(0) or exit(1) without having disengaged itself
from shared memory. We are at risk for this whenever third-party code is
loaded into a backend, since such code might not know it's supposed to go
through proc_exit() instead. Also, it is reported that under Windows
there are ways to externally kill a process that cause the status code
returned to the postmaster to be indistinguishable from a voluntary exit
(thank you, Microsoft). If this does happen then the system is probably
hosed --- for instance, the dead session might still be holding locks.
So the best recovery method is to treat this like a backend crash.
The dead man switch is armed for a particular child process when it
acquires a regular PGPROC, and disarmed when the PGPROC is released;
these should be the first and last touches of shared memory resources
in a backend, or close enough anyway. This choice means there is no
coverage for auxiliary processes, but I doubt we need that, since they
shouldn't be executing any user-provided code anyway.
This patch also improves the management of the EXEC_BACKEND
ShmemBackendArray array a bit, by reducing search costs.
Although this problem is of long standing, the lack of field complaints
seems to mean it's not critical enough to risk back-patching; at least
not till we get some more testing of this mechanism.
error message if the installation directory layout is messed up (or at least,
something more useful than the behavior exhibited in bug #4787). During
postmaster startup, check that get_pkglib_path resolves as a readable
directory; and if ParseTzFile() fails to open the expected timezone
abbreviation file, check the possibility that the directory is missing rather
than just the specified file. In case of either failure, issue a hint
suggesting that the installation is broken. These two checks cover the lib/
and share/ trees of a full installation, which should take care of most
scenarios where a sysadmin decides to get cute.
are using our own ports of getopt or getopt_long, those will define
the variable for themselves; and if not, we don't need these, because
we never touch the variable anyway.
temp relations; this is no more expensive than before, now that we have
pg_class.relistemp. Insert tests into bufmgr.c to prevent attempting
to fetch pages from nonlocal temp relations. This provides a low-level
defense against bugs-of-omission allowing temp pages to be loaded into shared
buffers, as in the contrib/pgstattuple problem reported by Stuart Bishop.
While at it, tweak a bunch of places to use new relcache tests (instead of
expensive probes into pg_namespace) to detect local or nonlocal temp tables.
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.
the cause of the "could not write to log file: Bad file descriptor"
errors reported at
http://archives.postgresql.org//pgsql-general/2008-06/msg00193.php
Backpatch to 8.3, the race condition was introduced by the CSV logging
patch.
Analysis and patch by Gurjeet Singh.
recovery: if background writer or pgstat process dies during recovery (or
any other child process, but those two are the only ones running), send
SIGQUIT to the startup process using correct pid.
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.
per-table overrides of parameters.
This removes a whole class of problems related to misusing the catalog,
and perhaps more importantly, gives us pg_dump support for the parameters.
Based on a patch by Euler Taveira de Oliveira, heavily reworked by me.
Tom Lane
Simon Riggs
Robert Haas
Peter Eisentraut
Heikki Linnakangas
Andrew Dunstan
Magnus Hagander
Bruce Momjian
Alvaro Herrera