new WAL arrives via streaming replication. This reduces the latency, and
also allows us to use a longer polling interval, which is good for energy
efficiency.
We still need to poll to check for the appearance of a trigger file, but
the interval is now 5 seconds (instead of 100ms), like when waiting for
a new WAL segment to appear in WAL archive.
max_standby_streaming_delay, and revise the implementation to avoid assuming
that timestamps found in WAL records can meaningfully be compared to clock
time on the standby server. Instead, the delay limits are compared to the
elapsed time since we last obtained a new WAL segment from archive or since
we were last "caught up" to WAL data arriving via streaming replication.
This avoids problems with clock skew between primary and standby, as well
as other corner cases that the original coding would misbehave in, such
as the primary server having significant idle time between transactions.
Per my complaint some time ago and considerable ensuing discussion.
Do some desultory editing on the hot standby documentation, too.
checkpoint_timeout to trigger restartpoints. We used to deliberately only
do time-based restartpoints, because if checkpoint_segments is small we
would spend time doing restartpoints more often than really necessary.
But now that restartpoints are done in bgwriter, they're not as
disruptive as they used to be. Secondly, because streaming replication
stores the streamed WAL files in pg_xlog, we want to clean it up more
often to avoid running out of disk space when checkpoint_timeout is large
and checkpoint_segments small.
Patch by Fujii Masao, with some minor changes by me.
and current server clock time to SR data messages. These are not currently
used on the slave side but seem likely to be useful in future, and it'd be
better not to change the SR protocol after release. Per discussion.
Also do some minor code review and cleanup on walsender.c, and improve the
protocol documentation.
libpq to send queries, making the waiting for responses interruptible on
platforms where PQexec() can't normally be interrupted by signals, such
as win32.
Fujii Masao and Magnus Hagander
enabled. Bypassing the kernel cache is counter-productive in that case,
because the archiver/walsender process will read from the WAL file
soon after it's written, and if it's not cached the read will cause
a physical read, eating I/O bandwidth available on the WAL drive.
Also, walreceiver process does unaligned writes, so disable O_DIRECT
in walreceiver process for that reason too.
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.
walreceiver as whole into a dynamically loaded module, split the
libpq-specific parts of it into dynamically loaded module and keep the rest
in the main backend binary.
Although Tom fixed the Windows compilation problems with the old walreceiver
module already, this is a cleaner division of labour and makes the code
more readable. There's also the prospect of adding new transport methods
as pluggable modules in the future, which this patch makes easier, though for
now the API between libpqwalreceiver and walreceiver process should be
considered private.
The libpq-specific module is now in src/backend/replication/libpqwalreceiver,
and the part linked with postgres binary is in
src/backend/replication/walreceiver.c.
Bruce Momjian
Robert Haas
Magnus Hagander
Heikki Linnakangas
Tom Lane
Tatsuo Ishii
Peter Eisentraut