Commit 09cf1d522 taught schedule_alarm() to not do anything if
the next requested event is after when we expect the next interrupt
to fire. However, if somehow an interrupt gets lost, we'll continue
to not do anything indefinitely, even after the "next interrupt" time
is obviously in the past. Thus, one missed interrupt can break
timeout scheduling for the life of the session. Michael Harris
reported a scenario where a bug in a user-defined function caused this
to happen, so you don't even need to assume kernel bugs exist to think
this is worth fixing. We can make things more robust at little cost
by detecting the case where signal_due_at is before "now" and forcing
a new setitimer call to occur. This isn't a completely bulletproof
fix of course; but in our typical usage pattern where we frequently set
timeouts and clear them before they are reached, the interrupt will
get re-enabled after at most one timeout interval, which with a little
luck will be before we really need it.
While here, let's mark signal_due_at as volatile, since the signal
handler can both examine and set it. I'm not sure there's any
actual risk given that signal_pending is already volatile, but
it's surely questionable.
Backpatch to v14 where this logic came in.
Michael Harris and Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CADofcAWbMrvgwSMqO4iG_iD3E2v8ZUrC-_crB41my=VMM02-CA@mail.gmail.com
A very common usage pattern is that we set a timeout that we don't
expect to reach, cancel it after a little bit, and later repeat.
With the original implementation of timeout.c, this results in one
setitimer() call per timeout set or cancel. We can do a lot better
by being lazy about changing the timeout interrupt request, namely:
(1) never cancel the outstanding interrupt, even when we have no
active timeout events;
(2) if we need to set an interrupt, but there already is one pending
at or before the required time, leave it alone. When the interrupt
happens, the signal handler will reschedule it at whatever time is
then needed.
For example, with a one-second setting for statement_timeout, this
method results in having to interact with the kernel only a little
more than once a second, no matter how many statements we execute
in between. The mainline code might never call setitimer() at all
after the first time, while each time the signal handler fires,
it sees that the then-pending request is most of a second away,
and that's when it sets the next interrupt request for. Each
mainline timeout-set request after that will observe that the time
it wants is past the pending interrupt request time, and do nothing.
This also works pretty well for cases where a few different timeout
lengths are in use, as long as none of them are very short. But
that describes our usage well.
Idea and original patch by Thomas Munro; I fixed a race condition
and improved the comments.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CA+hUKG+o6pbuHBJSGnud=TadsuXySWA7CCcPgCt2QE9F6_4iHQ@mail.gmail.com
Commit f8e5f156b added private state in postgres.c to track whether
a statement timeout is running. This seems like bad design to me;
timeout.c's private state should be the single source of truth about
that. We already fixed one bug associated with failure to keep those
states in sync (cf. be42015fc), and I've got little faith that we
won't find more in future. So get rid of postgres.c's local variable
by exposing a way to ask timeout.c whether a timeout is running.
(Obviously, such an inquiry is subject to race conditions, but it
seems fine for the purpose at hand.)
To make get_timeout_active() as cheap as possible, add a flag in
the per-timeout struct showing whether that timeout is active.
This allows some small savings elsewhere in timeout.c, mainly
elimination of unnecessary searches of the active_timeouts array.
While at it, fix enable_statement_timeout to not call disable_timeout
when statement_timeout is 0 and the timeout is not running. This
avoids a useless deschedule-and-reschedule-timeouts cycle, which
represents a significant savings (at least one kernel call) when
there is any other active timeout. Right now, there usually isn't,
but there are proposals around to change that.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16035-456e6e69ebfd4374@postgresql.org
It is equivalent in ANSI C to write (*funcptr) () and funcptr(). These
two styles have been applied inconsistently. After discussion, we'll
use the more verbose style for plain function pointer variables, to make
it clear that it's a variable, and the shorter style when the function
pointer is in a struct (s.func() or s->func()), because then it's clear
that it's not a plain function name, and otherwise the excessive
punctuation makes some of those invocations hard to read.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/f52c16db-14ed-757d-4b48-7ef360b1631d@2ndquadrant.com
If both timeout indicators are set when we arrive at ProcessInterrupts,
we've historically just reported "lock timeout". However, some buildfarm
members have been observed to fail isolationtester's timeouts test by
reporting "lock timeout" when the statement timeout was expected to fire
first. The cause seems to be that the process is allowed to sleep longer
than expected (probably due to heavy machine load) so that the lock
timeout happens before we reach the point of reporting the error, and
then this arbitrary tiebreak rule does the wrong thing. We can improve
matters by comparing the scheduled timeout times to decide which error
to report.
I had originally proposed greatly reducing the 1-second window between
the two timeouts in the test cases. On reflection that is a bad idea,
at least for the case where the lock timeout is expected to fire first,
because that would assume that it takes negligible time to get from
statement start to the beginning of the lock wait. Thus, this patch
doesn't completely remove the risk of test failures on slow machines.
Empirically, however, the case this handles is the one we are seeing
in the buildfarm. The explanation may be that the other case requires
the scheduler to take the CPU away from a busy process, whereas the
case fixed here only requires the scheduler to not give the CPU back
right away to a process that has been woken from a multi-second sleep
(and, perhaps, has been swapped out meanwhile).
Back-patch to 9.3 where the isolationtester timeouts test was added.
Discussion: <8693.1464314819@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To do so, move InitializeLatchSupport() into the new common process
initialization functions, and add a new global variable MyLatch.
MyLatch is usable as soon InitPostmasterChild() has been called
(i.e. very early during startup). Initially it points to a process
local latch that exists in all processes. InitProcess/InitAuxiliaryProcess
then replaces that local latch with PGPROC->procLatch. During shutdown
the reverse happens.
This is primarily advantageous for two reasons: For one it simplifies
dealing with the shared process latch, especially in signal handlers,
because instead of having to check for MyProc, MyLatch can be used
unconditionally. For another, a later patch that makes FEs/BE
communication use latches, now can rely on the existence of a latch,
even before having gone through InitProcess.
Discussion: 20140927191243.GD5423@alap3.anarazel.de
Serious oversight in commit 16e1b7a1b7f7ffd8a18713e83c8cd72c9ce48e07:
we should not allow an interrupt to take control away from mainline code
except when ImmediateInterruptOK is set. Just to be safe, let's adopt
the same save-clear-restore dance that's been used for many years in
HandleCatchupInterrupt and HandleNotifyInterrupt, so that nothing bad
happens if a timeout handler invokes code that tests or even manipulates
ImmediateInterruptOK.
Per report of "stuck spinlock" failures from Christophe Pettus, though
many other symptoms are possible. Diagnosis by Andres Freund.
Prevent handle_sig_alarm from losing control partway through due to a query
cancel (either an asynchronous SIGINT, or a cancel triggered by one of the
timeout handler functions). That would at least result in failure to
schedule any required future interrupt, and might result in actual
corruption of timeout.c's data structures, if the interrupt happened while
we were updating those.
We could still lose control if an asynchronous SIGINT arrives just as the
function is entered. This wouldn't break any data structures, but it would
have the same effect as if the SIGALRM interrupt had been silently lost:
we'd not fire any currently-due handlers, nor schedule any new interrupt.
To forestall that scenario, forcibly reschedule any pending timer interrupt
during AbortTransaction and AbortSubTransaction. We can avoid any extra
kernel call in most cases by not doing that until we've allowed
LockErrorCleanup to kill the DEADLOCK_TIMEOUT and LOCK_TIMEOUT events.
Another hazard is that some platforms (at least Linux and *BSD) block a
signal before calling its handler and then unblock it on return. When we
longjmp out of the handler, the unblock doesn't happen, and the signal is
left blocked indefinitely. Again, we can fix that by forcibly unblocking
signals during AbortTransaction and AbortSubTransaction.
These latter two problems do not manifest when the longjmp reaches
postgres.c, because the error recovery code there kills all pending timeout
events anyway, and it uses sigsetjmp(..., 1) so that the appropriate signal
mask is restored. So errors thrown outside any transaction should be OK
already, and cleaning up in AbortTransaction and AbortSubTransaction should
be enough to fix these issues. (We're assuming that any code that catches
a query cancel error and doesn't re-throw it will do at least a
subtransaction abort to clean up; but that was pretty much required already
by other subsystems.)
Lastly, ProcSleep should not clear the LOCK_TIMEOUT indicator flag when
disabling that event: if a lock timeout interrupt happened after the lock
was granted, the ensuing query cancel is still going to happen at the next
CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS, and we want to report it as a lock timeout not a user
cancel.
Per reports from Dan Wood.
Back-patch to 9.3 where the new timeout handling infrastructure was
introduced. We may at some point decide to back-patch the signal
unblocking changes further, but I'll desist from that until we hear
actual field complaints about it.
Rather than doing a fairly-expensive setitimer() call to prevent interrupts
from happening, let's just invent a simple boolean flag that the signal
handler is required to check. This is not only faster but considerably
more robust than before, since the previous code effectively assumed that
only ITIMER_REAL events would ever fire the SIGALRM handler, which is
obviously something that can be broken easily by third-party code.
Zoltán Böszörményi and Tom Lane
We had two copies of this function in the backend and libpq, which was
already pretty bogus, but it turns out that we need it in some other
programs that don't use libpq (such as pg_test_fsync). So put it where
it probably should have been all along. The signal-mask-initialization
support in src/backend/libpq/pqsignal.c stays where it is, though, since
we only need that in the backend.
This GUC allows limiting the time spent waiting to acquire any one
heavyweight lock.
In support of this, improve the recently-added timeout infrastructure
to permit efficiently enabling or disabling multiple timeouts at once.
That reduces the performance hit from turning on lock_timeout, though
it's still not zero.
Zoltán Böszörményi, reviewed by Tom Lane,
Stephen Frost, and Hari Babu
Management of timeouts was getting a little cumbersome; what we
originally had was more than enough back when we were only concerned
about deadlocks and query cancel; however, when we added timeouts for
standby processes, the code got considerably messier. Since there are
plans to add more complex timeouts, this seems a good time to introduce
a central timeout handling module.
External modules register their timeout handlers during process
initialization, and later enable and disable them as they see fit using
a simple API; timeout.c is in charge of keeping track of which timeouts
are in effect at any time, installing a common SIGALRM signal handler,
and calling setitimer() as appropriate to ensure timely firing of
external handlers.
timeout.c additionally supports pluggable modules to add their own
timeouts, though this capability isn't exercised anywhere yet.
Additionally, as of this commit, walsender processes are aware of
timeouts; we had a preexisting bug there that made those ignore SIGALRM,
thus being subject to unhandled deadlocks, particularly during the
authentication phase. This has already been fixed in back branches in
commit 0bf8eb2a, which see for more details.
Main author: Zoltán Böszörményi
Some review and cleanup by Álvaro Herrera
Extensive reworking by Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Peter Eisentraut
Andres Freund
Alvaro Herrera