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WAL segments have been archived and deleted in the master.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.
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
Bruce Momjian
Heikki Linnakangas