Commit Graph

551 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Robert Haas
4efe26cbd3 shm_mq: Third attempt at fixing nowait behavior in shm_mq_receive.
Commit a1480ec1d3 purported to fix the
problems with commit b2ccb5f4e6, but it
didn't completely fix them.  The problem is that the checks were
performed in the wrong order, leading to a race condition.  If the
sender attached, sent a message, and detached after the receiver
called shm_mq_get_sender and before the receiver called
shm_mq_counterparty_gone, we'd incorrectly return SHM_MQ_DETACHED
before all messages were read.  Repair by reversing the order of
operations, and add a long comment explaining why this new logic is
(hopefully) correct.
2015-11-03 09:12:52 -05:00
Tom Lane
620ac88d6f Remove some more dead Alpha-specific code. 2015-11-02 19:37:51 -05:00
Robert Haas
a1480ec1d3 shm_mq: Repair breakage from previous commit.
If the counterparty writes some data into the queue and then detaches,
it's wrong to return SHM_MQ_DETACHED right away.  If we do that, we
fail to read whatever was written.
2015-10-22 22:01:11 -04:00
Robert Haas
b2ccb5f4e6 shm_mq: Fix failure to notice a dead counterparty when nowait is used.
The shm_mq mechanism was intended to optionally notice when the process
on the other end of the queue fails to attach to the queue.  It does
this by allowing the user to pass a BackgroundWorkerHandle; if the
background worker in question is launched and dies without attaching
to the queue, then we know it never will.  This logic works OK in
blocking mode, but when called with nowait = true we fail to notice
that this has happened due to an asymmetry in the logic.  Repair.

Reported off-list by Rushabh Lathia.  Patch by me.
2015-10-22 16:33:30 -04:00
Robert Haas
d53e3d5fe0 Remove volatile qualifiers from proc.c and procarray.c
Prior to commit 0709b7ee72, access to
variables within a spinlock-protected critical section had to be done
through a volatile pointer, but that should no longer be necessary.

Michael Paquier
2015-10-16 14:20:36 -04:00
Robert Haas
430008b5a7 Remove volatile qualifiers from dynahash.c, shmem.c, and sinvaladt.c
Prior to commit 0709b7ee72, access to
variables within a spinlock-protected critical section had to be done
through a volatile pointer, but that should no longer be necessary.

Thomas Munro
2015-10-16 14:14:15 -04:00
Robert Haas
db0f6cad48 Remove set_latch_on_sigusr1 flag.
This flag has proven to be a recipe for bugs, and it doesn't seem like
it can really buy anything in terms of performance.  So let's just
*always* set the process latch when we receive SIGUSR1 instead of
trying to do it only when needed.

Per my recent proposal on pgsql-hackers.
2015-10-09 14:31:04 -04:00
Robert Haas
4a4e6893aa Glue layer to connect the executor to the shm_mq mechanism.
The shm_mq mechanism was built to send error (and notice) messages and
tuples between backends.  However, shm_mq itself only deals in raw
bytes.  Since commit 2bd9e412f9, we have
had infrastructure for one message to redirect protocol messages to a
queue and for another backend to parse them and do useful things with
them.  This commit introduces a somewhat analogous facility for tuples
by adding a new type of DestReceiver, DestTupleQueue, which writes
each tuple generated by a query into a shm_mq, and a new
TupleQueueFunnel facility which reads raw tuples out of the queue and
reconstructs the HeapTuple format expected by the executor.

The TupleQueueFunnel abstraction supports reading from multiple tuple
streams at the same time, but only in round-robin fashion.  Someone
could imaginably want other policies, but this should be good enough
to meet our short-term needs related to parallel query, and we can
always extend it later.

This also makes one minor addition to the shm_mq API that didn'
seem worth breaking out as a separate patch.

Extracted from Amit Kapila's parallel sequential scan patch.  This
code was originally written by me, and then it was revised by Amit,
and then it was revised some more by me.
2015-09-18 21:56:58 -04:00
Robert Haas
4aec49899e Assorted code review for recent ProcArrayLock patch.
Post-commit review by Andres Freund discovered a couple of concurrency
bugs in the original patch: specifically, if the leader cleared a
follower's XID before it reached PGSemaphoreLock, the semaphore would be
left in the wrong state; and if another process did PGSemaphoreUnlock
for some unrelated reason, we might resume execution before the fact
that our XID was cleared was globally visible.

Also, improve the wording of some comments, rename nextClearXidElem
to firstClearXidElem in PROC_HDR for clarity, and drop some volatile
qualifiers that aren't necessary.

Amit Kapila, reviewed and slightly revised by me.
2015-09-03 13:19:15 -04:00
Andres Freund
e95126cf04 Don't use function definitions looking like old-style ones.
This fixes a bunch of somewhat pedantic warnings with new
compilers. Since by far the majority of other functions definitions use
the (void) style it just seems to be consistent to do so as well in the
remaining few places.
2015-08-15 17:25:00 +02:00
Robert Haas
846f8c9483 Fix attach-related race condition in shm_mq_send_bytes.
Spotted by Antonin Houska.
2015-08-07 10:04:07 -04:00
Robert Haas
df0a67f754 Fix incorrect calculation in shm_mq_receive.
If some, but not all, of the length word has already been read, and the
next attempt to read sees exactly the number of bytes needed to complete
the length word, or fewer, then we'll incorrectly read less than all of
the available data.

Antonin Houska
2015-08-06 13:25:45 -04:00
Robert Haas
0e141c0fbb Reduce ProcArrayLock contention by removing backends in batches.
When a write transaction commits, it must clear its XID advertised via
the ProcArray, which requires that we hold ProcArrayLock in exclusive
mode in order to prevent concurrent processes running GetSnapshotData
from seeing inconsistent results.  When many processes try to commit
at once, ProcArrayLock must change hands repeatedly, with each
concurrent process trying to commit waking up to acquire the lock in
turn.  To make things more efficient, when more than one backend is
trying to commit a write transaction at the same time, have just one
of them acquire ProcArrayLock in exclusive mode and clear the XIDs of
all processes in the group.  Benchmarking reveals that this is much
more efficient at very high client counts.

Amit Kapila, heavily revised by me, with some review also from Pavan
Deolasee.
2015-08-06 12:02:12 -04:00
Bruce Momjian
807b9e0dff pgindent run for 9.5 2015-05-23 21:35:49 -04:00
Heikki Linnakangas
fa60fb63e5 Fix more typos in comments.
Patch by CharSyam, plus a few more I spotted with grep.
2015-05-20 19:45:43 +03:00
Heikki Linnakangas
4fc72cc7bb Collection of typo fixes.
Use "a" and "an" correctly, mostly in comments. Two error messages were
also fixed (they were just elogs, so no translation work required). Two
function comments in pg_proc.h were also fixed. Etsuro Fujita reported one
of these, but I found a lot more with grep.

Also fix a few other typos spotted while grepping for the a/an typos.
For example, "consists out of ..." -> "consists of ...". Plus a "though"/
"through" mixup reported by Euler Taveira.

Many of these typos were in old code, which would be nice to backpatch to
make future backpatching easier. But much of the code was new, and I didn't
feel like crafting separate patches for each branch. So no backpatching.
2015-05-20 16:56:22 +03:00
Robert Haas
924bcf4f16 Create an infrastructure for parallel computation in PostgreSQL.
This does four basic things.  First, it provides convenience routines
to coordinate the startup and shutdown of parallel workers.  Second,
it synchronizes various pieces of state (e.g. GUCs, combo CID
mappings, transaction snapshot) from the parallel group leader to the
worker processes.  Third, it prohibits various operations that would
result in unsafe changes to that state while parallelism is active.
Finally, it propagates events that would result in an ErrorResponse,
NoticeResponse, or NotifyResponse message being sent to the client
from the parallel workers back to the master, from which they can then
be sent on to the client.

Robert Haas, Amit Kapila, Noah Misch, Rushabh Lathia, Jeevan Chalke.
Suggestions and review from Andres Freund, Heikki Linnakangas, Noah
Misch, Simon Riggs, Euler Taveira, and Jim Nasby.
2015-04-30 15:02:14 -04:00
Andres Freund
5aa2350426 Introduce replication progress tracking infrastructure.
When implementing a replication solution ontop of logical decoding, two
related problems exist:
* How to safely keep track of replication progress
* How to change replication behavior, based on the origin of a row;
  e.g. to avoid loops in bi-directional replication setups

The solution to these problems, as implemented here, consist out of
three parts:

1) 'replication origins', which identify nodes in a replication setup.
2) 'replication progress tracking', which remembers, for each
   replication origin, how far replay has progressed in a efficient and
   crash safe manner.
3) The ability to filter out changes performed on the behest of a
   replication origin during logical decoding; this allows complex
   replication topologies. E.g. by filtering all replayed changes out.

Most of this could also be implemented in "userspace", e.g. by inserting
additional rows contain origin information, but that ends up being much
less efficient and more complicated.  We don't want to require various
replication solutions to reimplement logic for this independently. The
infrastructure is intended to be generic enough to be reusable.

This infrastructure also replaces the 'nodeid' infrastructure of commit
timestamps. It is intended to provide all the former capabilities,
except that there's only 2^16 different origins; but now they integrate
with logical decoding. Additionally more functionality is accessible via
SQL.  Since the commit timestamp infrastructure has also been introduced
in 9.5 (commit 73c986add) changing the API is not a problem.

For now the number of origins for which the replication progress can be
tracked simultaneously is determined by the max_replication_slots
GUC. That GUC is not a perfect match to configure this, but there
doesn't seem to be sufficient reason to introduce a separate new one.

Bumps both catversion and wal page magic.

Author: Andres Freund, with contributions from Petr Jelinek and Craig Ringer
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas, Petr Jelinek, Robert Haas, Steve Singer
Discussion: 20150216002155.GI15326@awork2.anarazel.de,
    20140923182422.GA15776@alap3.anarazel.de,
    20131114172632.GE7522@alap2.anarazel.de
2015-04-29 19:30:53 +02:00
Robert Haas
f272098e91 Fix another bug in DSM_CREATE_NULL_IF_MAXSEGMENTS handling.
Amit Kapila
2015-04-02 10:39:24 -04:00
Tom Lane
701dcc983e Fix rare core dump in BackendIdGetTransactionIds().
BackendIdGetTransactionIds() neglected the possibility that the PROC
pointer in a ProcState array entry is null.  In current usage, this could
only crash if the other backend had exited since pgstat_read_current_status
saw it as active, which is a pretty narrow window.  But it's reachable in
the field, per bug #12918 from Vladimir Borodin.

Back-patch to 9.4 where the faulty code was introduced.
2015-03-30 13:05:27 -04:00
Robert Haas
372b97097e Remove ill-advised pre-check for DSM segment exhaustion.
dsm_control->nitems never decreases, so this is testing whether the
server has *ever* run out of DSM segments, not whether it is
*currently* out of DSM segments.

Reported off-list by Amit Kapila.
2015-03-23 09:58:56 -04:00
Bruce Momjian
34afbba84e Use mmap MAP_NOSYNC option to limit shared memory writes
mmap() is rarely used for shared memory, but when it is, this option is
useful, particularly on the BSDs.

Patch by Sean Chittenden
2015-03-21 22:06:19 -04:00
Peter Eisentraut
28beb69f8b Fix whitespace 2015-03-19 22:18:46 -04:00
Robert Haas
12968cf408 Add flags argument to dsm_create.
Right now, there's only one flag, DSM_CREATE_NULL_IF_MAXSEGMENTS,
which suppresses the error that would normally be thrown when the
maximum number of segments already exists, instead returning NULL.
It might be useful to add more flags in the future, such as one to
ignore allocation errors, but I haven't done that here.
2015-03-19 13:03:03 -04:00
Tom Lane
2e211211a7 Use FLEXIBLE_ARRAY_MEMBER in a number of other places.
I think we're about done with this...
2015-02-21 16:12:14 -05:00
Tom Lane
33a3b03d63 Use FLEXIBLE_ARRAY_MEMBER in some more places.
Fix a batch of structs that are only visible within individual .c files.

Michael Paquier
2015-02-20 17:32:01 -05:00
Andres Freund
2505ce0be0 Remove remnants of ImmediateInterruptOK handling.
Now that nothing sets ImmediateInterruptOK to true anymore, we can
remove all the supporting code.

Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas
2015-02-03 23:25:47 +01:00
Andres Freund
4f85fde8eb Introduce and use infrastructure for interrupt processing during client reads.
Up to now large swathes of backend code ran inside signal handlers
while reading commands from the client, to allow for speedy reaction to
asynchronous events. Most prominently shared invalidation and NOTIFY
handling. That means that complex code like the starting/stopping of
transactions is run in signal handlers...  The required code was
fragile and verbose, and is likely to contain bugs.

That approach also severely limited what could be done while
communicating with the client. As the read might be from within
openssl it wasn't safely possible to trigger an error, e.g. to cancel
a backend in idle-in-transaction state. We did that in some cases,
namely fatal errors, nonetheless.

Now that FE/BE communication in the backend employs non-blocking
sockets and latches to block, we can quite simply interrupt reads from
signal handlers by setting the latch. That allows us to signal an
interrupted read, which is supposed to be retried after returning from
within the ssl library.

As signal handlers now only need to set the latch to guarantee timely
interrupt processing, remove a fair amount of complicated & fragile
code from async.c and sinval.c.

We could now actually start to process some kinds of interrupts, like
sinval ones, more often that before, but that seems better done
separately.

This work will hopefully allow to handle cases like being blocked by
sending data, interrupting idle transactions and similar to be
implemented without too much effort.  In addition to allowing getting
rid of ImmediateInterruptOK, that is.

Author: Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas
2015-02-03 22:25:20 +01:00
Andres Freund
59f71a0d0b Add a default local latch for use in signal handlers.
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
2015-01-14 18:45:22 +01:00
Stephen Frost
1bf4a84d0f Skip dead backends in MinimumActiveBackends
Back in ed0b409, PGPROC was split and moved to static variables in
procarray.c, with procs in ProcArrayStruct replaced by an array of
integers representing process numbers (pgprocnos), with -1 indicating a
dead process which has yet to be removed.  Access to procArray is
generally done under ProcArrayLock and therefore most code does not have
to concern itself with -1 entries.

However, MinimumActiveBackends intentionally does not take
ProcArrayLock, which means it has to be extra careful when accessing
procArray.  Prior to ed0b409, this was handled by checking for a NULL
in the pointer array, but that check was no longer valid after the
split.  Coverity pointed out that the check could never happen and so
it was removed in 5592eba.  That didn't make anything worse, but it
didn't fix the issue either.

The correct fix is to check for pgprocno == -1 and skip over that entry
if it is encountered.

Back-patch to 9.2, since there can be attempts to access the arrays
prior to their start otherwise.  Note that the changes prior to 9.4 will
look a bit different due to the change in 5592eba.

Note that MinimumActiveBackends only returns a bool for heuristic
purposes and any pre-array accesses are strictly read-only and so there
is no security implication and the lack of fields complaints indicates
it's very unlikely to run into issues due to this.

Pointed out by Noah.
2015-01-12 11:31:57 -05:00
Bruce Momjian
4baaf863ec Update copyright for 2015
Backpatch certain files through 9.0
2015-01-06 11:43:47 -05:00
Alvaro Herrera
73c986adde Keep track of transaction commit timestamps
Transactions can now set their commit timestamp directly as they commit,
or an external transaction commit timestamp can be fed from an outside
system using the new function TransactionTreeSetCommitTsData().  This
data is crash-safe, and truncated at Xid freeze point, same as pg_clog.

This module is disabled by default because it causes a performance hit,
but can be enabled in postgresql.conf requiring only a server restart.

A new test in src/test/modules is included.

Catalog version bumped due to the new subdirectory within PGDATA and a
couple of new SQL functions.

Authors: Álvaro Herrera and Petr Jelínek

Reviewed to varying degrees by Michael Paquier, Andres Freund, Robert
Haas, Amit Kapila, Fujii Masao, Jaime Casanova, Simon Riggs, Steven
Singer, Peter Eisentraut
2014-12-03 11:53:02 -03:00
Heikki Linnakangas
2c03216d83 Revamp the WAL record format.
Each WAL record now carries information about the modified relation and
block(s) in a standardized format. That makes it easier to write tools that
need that information, like pg_rewind, prefetching the blocks to speed up
recovery, etc.

There's a whole new API for building WAL records, replacing the XLogRecData
chains used previously. The new API consists of XLogRegister* functions,
which are called for each buffer and chunk of data that is added to the
record. The new API also gives more control over when a full-page image is
written, by passing flags to the XLogRegisterBuffer function.

This also simplifies the XLogReadBufferForRedo() calls. The function can dig
the relation and block number from the WAL record, so they no longer need to
be passed as arguments.

For the convenience of redo routines, XLogReader now disects each WAL record
after reading it, copying the main data part and the per-block data into
MAXALIGNed buffers. The data chunks are not aligned within the WAL record,
but the redo routines can assume that the pointers returned by XLogRecGet*
functions are. Redo routines are now passed the XLogReaderState, which
contains the record in the already-disected format, instead of the plain
XLogRecord.

The new record format also makes the fixed size XLogRecord header smaller,
by removing the xl_len field. The length of the "main data" portion is now
stored at the end of the WAL record, and there's a separate header after
XLogRecord for it. The alignment padding at the end of XLogRecord is also
removed. This compansates for the fact that the new format would otherwise
be more bulky than the old format.

Reviewed by Andres Freund, Amit Kapila, Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera,
Fujii Masao.
2014-11-20 18:46:41 +02:00
Heikki Linnakangas
2076db2aea Move the backup-block logic from XLogInsert to a new file, xloginsert.c.
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.
2014-11-06 13:55:36 +02:00
Robert Haas
f7102b0463 Extend dsm API with a new function dsm_unpin_mapping.
This reassociates a dynamic shared memory handle previous passed to
dsm_pin_mapping with the current resource owner, so that it will be
cleaned up at the end of the current query.

Patch by me.  Review of the function name by Andres Freund, Amit
Kapila, Jim Nasby, Petr Jelinek, and Álvaro Herrera.
2014-10-30 14:55:23 -04:00
Robert Haas
6057c212f3 "Pin", rather than "keep", dynamic shared memory mappings and segments.
Nobody seemed concerned about this naming when it originally went in,
but there's a pending patch that implements the opposite of
dsm_keep_mapping, and the term "unkeep" was judged unpalatable.
"unpin" has existing precedent in the PostgreSQL code base, and the
English language, so use this terminology instead.

Per discussion, back-patch to 9.4.
2014-10-30 11:35:55 -04:00
Robert Haas
7bb0e97407 Extend shm_mq API with new functions shm_mq_sendv, shm_mq_set_handle.
shm_mq_sendv sends a message to the queue assembled from multiple
locations.  This is expected to be used by forthcoming patches to
allow frontend/backend protocol messages to be sent via shm_mq, but
might be useful for other purposes as well.

shm_mq_set_handle associates a BackgroundWorkerHandle with an
already-existing shm_mq_handle.  This solves a timing problem when
creating a shm_mq to communicate with a newly-launched background
worker: if you attach to the queue first, and the background worker
fails to start, you might block forever trying to do I/O on the queue;
but if you start the background worker first, but then die before
attaching to the queue, the background worrker might block forever
trying to do I/O on the queue.  This lets you attach before starting
the worker (so that the worker is protected) and then associate the
BackgroundWorkerHandle later (so that you are also protected).

Patch by me, reviewed by Stephen Frost.
2014-10-08 14:38:31 -04:00
Peter Eisentraut
303f4d1012 Assorted message fixes and improvements 2014-09-05 01:25:27 -04:00
Robert Haas
1144ea3421 Prevent shm_mq_send from reading uninitialized memory.
shm_mq_send_bytes didn't invariably initialize *bytes_written before
returning, which would cause shm_mq_send to read from uninitialized
memory and add the value it found there to mqh->mqh_partial_bytes.
This could cause the next attempt to send a message via the queue to
fail an assertion (if the queue was detached) or copy data from a
garbage pointer value into the queue (if non-blocking mode was in use).
2014-07-24 09:23:22 -04:00
Heikki Linnakangas
57b7e83b0d Fix misc typos in comments. 2014-05-23 08:16:21 -04:00
Robert Haas
11ad3b35c2 Remove unnecessary cleanup code.
This is all inside a block guarded by op == DSM_OP_ATTACH, so it can
never be the case that op == DSM_OP_CREATE.

Reported by Coverity.
2014-05-22 10:41:48 -04:00
Heikki Linnakangas
51f41e8c0a Fix typos in comments. 2014-05-21 23:19:01 -04:00
Robert Haas
e0124230ba Fix logic bug in dsm_attach().
The previous coding would potentially cause attaching to segment A to
fail if segment B was at the same time in the process of going away.

Andres Freund, with a comment tweak by me
2014-05-06 13:40:34 -04:00
Bruce Momjian
0a78320057 pgindent run for 9.4
This includes removing tabs after periods in C comments, which was
applied to back branches, so this change should not effect backpatching.
2014-05-06 12:12:18 -04:00
Tom Lane
0f928a85ec Fix possible cache invalidation failure in ReceiveSharedInvalidMessages.
Commit fad153ec45 modified sinval.c to reduce
the number of calls into sinvaladt.c (which require taking a shared lock)
by keeping a local buffer of collected-but-not-yet-processed messages.
However, if processing of the last message in a batch resulted in a
recursive call to ReceiveSharedInvalidMessages, we could overwrite that
message with a new one while the outer invalidation function was still
working on it.  This would be likely to lead to invalidation of the wrong
cache entry, allowing subsequent processing to use stale cache data.
The fix is just to make a local copy of each message while we're processing
it.

Spotted by Andres Freund.  Back-patch to 8.4 where the bug was introduced.
2014-05-05 14:43:39 -04:00
Robert Haas
5ec45bb7fa Consistently allow reading of messages from a detached shm_mq.
This was intended to work always, but the previous code only allowed
it if at least one message was successfully read by the receiver
before the sender detached the queue.

Report by Petr Jelinek.  Patch by me.
2014-04-30 17:38:18 -04:00
Robert Haas
1a81daab8b Try to fix spurious DSM failures on Windows.
Apparently, Windows can sometimes return an error code even when the
operation actually worked just fine.  Rearrange the order of checks
according to what appear to be the best practices in this area.

Amit Kapila
2014-04-16 12:04:44 -04:00
Robert Haas
11a65eed16 Get rid of the dynamic shared memory state file.
Instead of storing the ID of the dynamic shared memory control
segment in a file within the data directory, store it in the main
control segment.  This avoids a number of nasty corner cases,
most seriously that doing an online backup and then using it on
the same machine (e.g. to fire up a standby) would result in the
standby clobbering all of the master's dynamic shared memory
segments.

Per complaints from Heikki Linnakangas, Fujii Masao, and Tom
Lane.
2014-04-08 11:39:55 -04:00
Robert Haas
250f8a7bbe Rewrite comment for shm_mq_receive_bytes.
The comment and the code diverged at some point before the initial
commit of this feature, and I failed to notice.

Noted by Tom Lane.
2014-03-18 11:53:28 -04:00
Robert Haas
3bd261ca18 Improve shm_mq portability around MAXIMUM_ALIGNOF and sizeof(Size).
Revise the original decision to expose a uint64-based interface and
use Size everywhere possible.  Avoid assuming that MAXIMUM_ALIGNOF is
8, or making any assumption about the relationship between that value
and sizeof(Size).  If MAXIMUM_ALIGNOF is bigger, we'll now insert
padding after the length word; if it's smaller, we are now prepared
to read and write the length word in chunks.

Per discussion with Tom Lane.
2014-03-18 11:23:13 -04:00