Currently writes to the main data files of postgres all go through the
OS page cache. This means that some operating systems can end up
collecting a large number of dirty buffers in their respective page
caches. When these dirty buffers are flushed to storage rapidly, be it
because of fsync(), timeouts, or dirty ratios, latency for other reads
and writes can increase massively. This is the primary reason for
regular massive stalls observed in real world scenarios and artificial
benchmarks; on rotating disks stalls on the order of hundreds of seconds
have been observed.
On linux it is possible to control this by reducing the global dirty
limits significantly, reducing the above problem. But global
configuration is rather problematic because it'll affect other
applications; also PostgreSQL itself doesn't always generally want this
behavior, e.g. for temporary files it's undesirable.
Several operating systems allow some control over the kernel page
cache. Linux has sync_file_range(2), several posix systems have msync(2)
and posix_fadvise(2). sync_file_range(2) is preferable because it
requires no special setup, whereas msync() requires the to-be-flushed
range to be mmap'ed. For the purpose of flushing dirty data
posix_fadvise(2) is the worst alternative, as flushing dirty data is
just a side-effect of POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED, which also removes the pages
from the page cache. Thus the feature is enabled by default only on
linux, but can be enabled on all systems that have any of the above
APIs.
While desirable and likely possible this patch does not contain an
implementation for windows.
With the infrastructure added, writes made via checkpointer, bgwriter
and normal user backends can be flushed after a configurable number of
writes. Each of these sources of writes controlled by a separate GUC,
checkpointer_flush_after, bgwriter_flush_after and backend_flush_after
respectively; they're separate because the number of flushes that are
good are separate, and because the performance considerations of
controlled flushing for each of these are different.
A later patch will add checkpoint sorting - after that flushes from the
ckeckpoint will almost always be desirable. Bgwriter flushes are most of
the time going to be random, which are slow on lots of storage hardware.
Flushing in backends works well if the storage and bgwriter can keep up,
but if not it can have negative consequences. This patch is likely to
have negative performance consequences without checkpoint sorting, but
unfortunately so has sorting without flush control.
Discussion: alpine.DEB.2.10.1506011320000.28433@sto
Author: Fabien Coelho and Andres Freund
Commit a892234f83 gave us enough
infrastructure to avoid vacuuming pages where every tuple on the
page is already frozen. So, replace the notion of a scan_all or
whole-table vacuum with the less onerous notion of an "aggressive"
vacuum, which will pages that are all-visible, but still skip those
that are all-frozen.
This should greatly reduce the cost of anti-wraparound vacuuming
on large clusters where the majority of data is never touched
between one cycle and the next, because we'll no longer have to
read all of those pages only to find out that we don't need to
do anything with them.
Patch by me, reviewed by Masahiko Sawada.
Commit 4de82f7d7 increased the WAL flush rate, mainly to increase the
likelihood that hint bits can be set quickly. More quickly set hint bits
can reduce contention around the clog et al. But unfortunately the
increased flush rate can have a significant negative performance impact,
I have measured up to a factor of ~4. The reason for this slowdown is
that if there are independent writes to the underlying devices, for
example because shared buffers is a lot smaller than the hot data set,
or because a checkpoint is ongoing, the fdatasync() calls force cache
flushes to be emitted to the storage.
This is achieved by flushing WAL only if the last flush was longer than
wal_writer_delay ago, or if more than wal_writer_flush_after (new GUC)
unflushed blocks are pending. Based on some tests the default for
wal_writer_delay is 1MB, which seems to work well both on SSD and
rotational media.
To avoid negative performance impact due to 4de82f7d7 an earlier
commit (db76b1e) made SetHintBits() more likely to succeed; preventing
performance regressions in the pgbench tests I performed.
Discussion: 20160118163908.GW10941@awork2.anarazel.de
When force_parallel_mode = true, we enable the parallel mode restrictions
for all queries for which this is believed to be safe. For the subset of
those queries believed to be safe to run entirely within a worker, we spin
up a worker and run the query there instead of running it in the
original process. When force_parallel_mode = regress, make additional
changes to allow the regression tests to run cleanly even though parallel
workers have been injected under the hood.
Taken together, this facilitates both better user testing and better
regression testing of the parallelism code.
Robert Haas, with help from Amit Kapila and Rushabh Lathia.
These were discussed in three different sections of the manual, which
unsurprisingly had diverged over time; and the descriptions of individual
variables lacked stylistic consistency even within each section (and
frequently weren't in very good English anyway). Clean up the mess, and
remove some of the redundant information in hopes that future additions
will be less likely to re-introduce inconsistency. For instance I see
no need for maintenance.sgml to include its very own list of all the
autovacuum storage parameters, especially since that list was already
incomplete.
Specifically, make its effect independent from the row_security GUC, and
make it affect permission checks pertinent to views the BYPASSRLS role
owns. The row_security GUC thereby ceases to change successful-query
behavior; it can only make a query fail with an error. Back-patch to
9.5, where BYPASSRLS was introduced.
A Gather executor node runs any number of copies of a plan in an equal
number of workers and merges all of the results into a single tuple
stream. It can also run the plan itself, if the workers are
unavailable or haven't started up yet. It is intended to work with
the Partial Seq Scan node which will be added in future commits.
It could also be used to implement parallel query of a different sort
by itself, without help from Partial Seq Scan, if the single_copy mode
is used. In that mode, a worker executes the plan, and the parallel
leader does not, merely collecting the worker's results. So, a Gather
node could be inserted into a plan to split the execution of that plan
across two processes. Nested Gather nodes aren't currently supported,
but we might want to add support for that in the future.
There's nothing in the planner to actually generate Gather nodes yet,
so it's not quite time to break out the champagne. But we're getting
close.
Amit Kapila. Some designs suggestions were provided by me, and I also
reviewed the patch. Single-copy mode, documentation, and other minor
changes also by me.
Every query of a single ENABLE ROW SECURITY table has two meanings, with
the row_security GUC selecting between them. With row_security=force
available, every function author would have been advised to either set
the GUC locally or test both meanings. Non-compliance would have
threatened reliability and, for SECURITY DEFINER functions, security.
Authors already face an obligation to account for search_path, and we
should not mimic that example. With this change, only BYPASSRLS roles
need exercise the aforementioned care. Back-patch to 9.5, where the
row_security GUC was introduced.
Since this narrows the domain of pg_db_role_setting.setconfig and
pg_proc.proconfig, one might bump catversion. A row_security=force
setting in one of those columns will elicit a clear message, so don't.
Per discussion, nowadays it is possible to have tablespaces that have
wildly different I/O characteristics from others. Setting different
effective_io_concurrency parameters for those has been measured to
improve performance.
Author: Julien Rouhaud
Reviewed by: Andres Freund
While postgres' use of SSL renegotiation is a good idea in theory, it
turned out to not work well in practice. The specification and openssl's
implementation of it have lead to several security issues. Postgres' use
of renegotiation also had its share of bugs.
Additionally OpenSSL has a bunch of bugs around renegotiation, reported
and open for years, that regularly lead to connections breaking with
obscure error messages. We tried increasingly complex workarounds to get
around these bugs, but we didn't find anything complete.
Since these connection breakages often lead to hard to debug problems,
e.g. spuriously failing base backups and significant latency spikes when
synchronous replication is used, we have decided to change the default
setting for ssl renegotiation to 0 (disabled) in the released
backbranches and remove it entirely in 9.5 and master.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: 20150624144148.GQ4797@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 9.5 and master, 9.0-9.4 get a different patch
When enabling wal_compression, there is a risk to leak data similarly to
the BREACH and CRIME attacks on SSL where the compression ratio of
a full page image gives a hint of what is the existing data of this page.
This vulnerability is quite cumbersome to exploit in practice, but doable.
So this patch makes wal_compression PGC_SUSET in order to prevent
non-superusers from enabling it and exploiting the vulnerability while
DBA thinks the risk very seriously and disables it in postgresql.conf.
Back-patch to 9.5 where wal_compression was introduced.
As first committed, this view reported on the file contents as they were
at the last SIGHUP event. That's not as useful as reporting on the current
contents, and what's more, it didn't work right on Windows unless the
current session had serviced at least one SIGHUP. Therefore, arrange to
re-read the files when pg_show_all_settings() is called. This requires
only minor refactoring so that we can pass changeVal = false to
set_config_option() so that it won't actually apply any changes locally.
In addition, add error reporting so that errors that would prevent the
configuration files from being loaded, or would prevent individual settings
from being applied, are visible directly in the view. This makes the view
usable for pre-testing whether edits made in the config files will have the
desired effect, before one actually issues a SIGHUP.
I also added an "applied" column so that it's easy to identify entries that
are superseded by later entries; this was the main use-case for the original
design, but it seemed unnecessarily hard to use for that.
Also fix a 9.4.1 regression that allowed multiple entries for a
PGC_POSTMASTER variable to cause bogus complaints in the postmaster log.
(The issue here was that commit bf007a27ac unintentionally reverted
3e3f65973a, which suppressed any duplicate entries within
ParseConfigFp. However, since the original coding of the pg_file_settings
view depended on such suppression *not* happening, we couldn't have fixed
this issue now without first doing something with pg_file_settings.
Now we suppress duplicates by marking them "ignored" within
ProcessConfigFileInternal, which doesn't hide them in the view.)
Lesser changes include:
Drive the view directly off the ConfigVariable list, instead of making a
basically-equivalent second copy of the data. There's no longer any need
to hang onto the data permanently, anyway.
Convert show_all_file_settings() to do its work in one call and return a
tuplestore; this avoids risks associated with assuming that the GUC state
will hold still over the course of query execution. (I think there were
probably latent bugs here, though you might need something like a cursor
on the view to expose them.)
Arrange to run SIGHUP processing in a short-lived memory context, to
forestall process-lifespan memory leaks. (There is one known leak in this
code, in ProcessConfigDirectory; it seems minor enough to not be worth
back-patching a specific fix for.)
Remove mistaken assignment to ConfigFileLineno that caused line counting
after an include_dir directive to be completely wrong.
Add missed failure check in AlterSystemSetConfigFile(). We don't really
expect ParseConfigFp() to fail, but that's not an excuse for not checking.
This file isn't entirely consistent about whether "on" and "off"
should be marked up with <literal>, but it doesn't make much sense
to be inconsistent within a single sentence.
Etsuro Fujita
The introduction of min_wal_size & max_wal_size in 88e9823026 makes it
feasible to increase the default upper bound in checkpoint
size. Previously raising the default would lead to a increased disk
footprint, even if more segments weren't beneficial. The low default of
checkpoint size is one of common performance problem users have thus
increasing the default makes sense. Setups where the increase in
maximum disk usage is a problem will very likely have to run with a
modified configuration anyway.
Discussion: 54F4EFB8.40202@agliodbs.com,
CA+TgmoZEAgX5oMGJOHVj8L7XOkAe05Gnf45rP40m-K3FhZRVKg@mail.gmail.com
Author: Josh Berkus, after a discussion involving lots of people.
While the SQL standard is pretty vague on the overall topic of operator
precedence (because it never presents a unified BNF for all expressions),
it does seem reasonable to conclude from the spec for <boolean value
expression> that OR has the lowest precedence, then AND, then NOT, then IS
tests, then the six standard comparison operators, then everything else
(since any non-boolean operator in a WHERE clause would need to be an
argument of one of these).
We were only sort of on board with that: most notably, while "<" ">" and
"=" had properly low precedence, "<=" ">=" and "<>" were treated as generic
operators and so had significantly higher precedence. And "IS" tests were
even higher precedence than those, which is very clearly wrong per spec.
Another problem was that "foo NOT SOMETHING bar" constructs, such as
"x NOT LIKE y", were treated inconsistently because of a bison
implementation artifact: they had the documented precedence with respect
to operators to their right, but behaved like NOT (i.e., very low priority)
with respect to operators to their left.
Fixing the precedence issues is just a small matter of rearranging the
precedence declarations in gram.y, except for the NOT problem, which
requires adding an additional lookahead case in base_yylex() so that we
can attach a different token precedence to NOT LIKE and allied two-word
operators.
The bulk of this patch is not the bug fix per se, but adding logic to
parse_expr.c to allow giving warnings if an expression has changed meaning
because of these precedence changes. These warnings are off by default
and are enabled by the new GUC operator_precedence_warning. It's believed
that very few applications will be affected by these changes, but it was
agreed that a warning mechanism is essential to help debug any that are.
When newly-added GUC parameter, wal_compression, is on, the PostgreSQL server
compresses a full page image written to WAL when full_page_writes is on or
during a base backup. A compressed page image will be decompressed during WAL
replay. Turning this parameter on can reduce the WAL volume without increasing
the risk of unrecoverable data corruption, but at the cost of some extra CPU
spent on the compression during WAL logging and on the decompression during
WAL replay.
This commit changes the WAL format (so bumping WAL version number) so that
the one-byte flag indicating whether a full page image is compressed or not is
included in its header information. This means that the commit increases the
WAL volume one-byte per a full page image even if WAL compression is not used
at all. We can save that one-byte by borrowing one-bit from the existing field
like hole_offset in the header and using it as the flag, for example. But which
would reduce the code readability and the extensibility of the feature.
Per discussion, it's not worth paying those prices to save only one-byte, so we
decided to add the one-byte flag to the header.
This commit doesn't introduce any new compression algorithm like lz4.
Currently a full page image is compressed using the existing PGLZ algorithm.
Per discussion, we decided to use it at least in the first version of the
feature because there were no performance reports showing that its compression
ratio is unacceptably lower than that of other algorithm. Of course,
in the future, it's worth considering the support of other compression
algorithm for the better compression.
Rahila Syed and Michael Paquier, reviewed in various versions by myself,
Andres Freund, Robert Haas, Abhijit Menon-Sen and many others.
The introduction in the Shared Library Preloading section already
instructs the user to separate multiple library names with commas, so
just remove the fragment from here.
Author: Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker
Instead of having a single knob (checkpoint_segments) that both triggers
checkpoints, and determines how many checkpoints to recycle, they are now
separate concerns. There is still an internal variable called
CheckpointSegments, which triggers checkpoints. But it no longer determines
how many segments to recycle at a checkpoint. That is now auto-tuned by
keeping a moving average of the distance between checkpoints (in bytes),
and trying to keep that many segments in reserve. The advantage of this is
that you can set max_wal_size very high, but the system won't actually
consume that much space if there isn't any need for it. The min_wal_size
sets a floor for that; you can effectively disable the auto-tuning behavior
by setting min_wal_size equal to max_wal_size.
The max_wal_size setting is now the actual target size of WAL at which a
new checkpoint is triggered, instead of the distance between checkpoints.
Previously, you could calculate the actual WAL usage with the formula
"(2 + checkpoint_completion_target) * checkpoint_segments + 1". With this
patch, you set the desired WAL usage with max_wal_size, and the system
calculates the appropriate CheckpointSegments with the reverse of that
formula. That's a lot more intuitive for administrators to set.
Reviewed by Amit Kapila and Venkata Balaji N.
Previously when the standby server failed to retrieve WAL files from any sources
(i.e., streaming replication, local pg_xlog directory or WAL archive), it always
waited for five seconds (hard-coded) before the next attempt. For example,
this is problematic in warm-standby because restore_command can fail
every five seconds even while new WAL file is expected to be unavailable for
a long time and flood the log files with its error messages.
This commit adds new parameter, wal_retrieve_retry_interval, to control that
wait time.
Alexey Vasiliev and Michael Paquier, reviewed by Andres Freund and me.
This allows it to be used with ALTER ROLE SET.
Although the old setting of PGC_BACKEND prevented changes after session
start, after discussion it was more useful to allow ALTER ROLE SET
instead and just document that changes during a session have no effect.
This is similar to how session_preload_libraries works already.
An alternative would be to change things to allow PGC_BACKEND and
PGC_SU_BACKEND settings to be changed by ALTER ROLE SET. But that might
need further research (e.g., log_connections would probably not work).
based on patch by Kyotaro Horiguchi
The ALTER SYSTEM ref page hadn't been held to a very high standard, nor
was the feature well integrated into section 18.1 (parameter setting).
Also, though commit 4c4654afe had improved the structure of 18.1, it also
introduced a lot of poor wording, imprecision, and outright falsehoods.
Try to clean that up.
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
Previously the maximum size of GIN pending list was controlled only by
work_mem. But the reasonable value of work_mem and the reasonable size
of the list are basically not the same, so it was not appropriate to
control both of them by only one GUC, i.e., work_mem. This commit
separates new GUC, pending_list_cleanup_size, from work_mem to allow
users to control only the size of the list.
Also this commit adds pending_list_cleanup_size as new storage parameter
to allow users to specify the size of the list per index. This is useful,
for example, when users want to increase the size of the list only for
the GIN index which can be updated heavily, and decrease it otherwise.
Reviewed by Etsuro Fujita.
Up to now, PG has assumed that any given timezone abbreviation (such as
"EDT") represents a constant GMT offset in the usage of any particular
region; we had a way to configure what that offset was, but not for it
to be changeable over time. But, as with most things horological, this
view of the world is too simplistic: there are numerous regions that have
at one time or another switched to a different GMT offset but kept using
the same timezone abbreviation. Almost the entire Russian Federation did
that a few years ago, and later this month they're going to do it again.
And there are similar examples all over the world.
To cope with this, invent the notion of a "dynamic timezone abbreviation",
which is one that is referenced to a particular underlying timezone
(as defined in the IANA timezone database) and means whatever it currently
means in that zone. For zones that use or have used daylight-savings time,
the standard and DST abbreviations continue to have the property that you
can specify standard or DST time and get that time offset whether or not
DST was theoretically in effect at the time. However, the abbreviations
mean what they meant at the time in question (or most recently before that
time) rather than being absolutely fixed.
The standard abbreviation-list files have been changed to use this behavior
for abbreviations that have actually varied in meaning since 1970. The
old simple-numeric definitions are kept for abbreviations that have not
changed, since they are a bit faster to resolve.
While this is clearly a new feature, it seems necessary to back-patch it
into all active branches, because otherwise use of Russian zone
abbreviations is going to become even more problematic than it already was.
This change supersedes the changes in commit 513d06ded et al to modify the
fixed meanings of the Russian abbreviations; since we've not shipped that
yet, this will avoid an undesirably incompatible (not to mention incorrect)
change in behavior for timestamps between 2011 and 2014.
This patch makes some cosmetic changes in ecpglib to keep its usage of
datetime lookup tables as similar as possible to the backend code, but
doesn't do anything about the increasingly obsolete set of timezone
abbreviation definitions that are hard-wired into ecpglib. Whatever we
do about that will likely not be appropriate material for back-patching.
Also, a potential free() of a garbage pointer after an out-of-memory
failure in ecpglib has been fixed.
This patch also fixes pre-existing bugs in DetermineTimeZoneOffset() that
caused it to produce unexpected results near a timezone transition, if
both the "before" and "after" states are marked as standard time. We'd
only ever thought about or tested transitions between standard and DST
time, but that's not what's happening when a zone simply redefines their
base GMT offset.
In passing, update the SGML documentation to refer to the Olson/zoneinfo/
zic timezone database as the "IANA" database, since it's now being
maintained under the auspices of IANA.
Buildfarm member tick identified an issue where the policies in the
relcache for a relation were were being replaced underneath a running
query, leading to segfaults while processing the policies to be added
to a query. Similar to how TupleDesc RuleLocks are handled, add in a
equalRSDesc() function to check if the policies have actually changed
and, if not, swap back the rsdesc field (using the original instead of
the temporairly built one; the whole structure is swapped and then
specific fields swapped back). This now passes a CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS
for me and should resolve the buildfarm error.
In addition to addressing this, add a new chapter in Data Definition
under Privileges which explains row security and provides examples of
its usage, change \d to always list policies (even if row security is
disabled- but note that it is disabled, or enabled with no policies),
rework check_role_for_policy (it really didn't need the entire policy,
but it did need to be using has_privs_of_role()), and change the field
in pg_class to relrowsecurity from relhasrowsecurity, based on
Heikki's suggestion. Also from Heikki, only issue SET ROW_SECURITY in
pg_restore when talking to a 9.5+ server, list Bypass RLS in \du, and
document --enable-row-security options for pg_dump and pg_restore.
Lastly, fix a number of minor whitespace and typo issues from Heikki,
Dimitri, add a missing #include, per Peter E, fix a few minor
variable-assigned-but-not-used and resource leak issues from Coverity
and add tab completion for role attribute bypassrls as well.
Building on the updatable security-barrier views work, add the
ability to define policies on tables to limit the set of rows
which are returned from a query and which are allowed to be added
to a table. Expressions defined by the policy for filtering are
added to the security barrier quals of the query, while expressions
defined to check records being added to a table are added to the
with-check options of the query.
New top-level commands are CREATE/ALTER/DROP POLICY and are
controlled by the table owner. Row Security is able to be enabled
and disabled by the owner on a per-table basis using
ALTER TABLE .. ENABLE/DISABLE ROW SECURITY.
Per discussion, ROW SECURITY is disabled on tables by default and
must be enabled for policies on the table to be used. If no
policies exist on a table with ROW SECURITY enabled, a default-deny
policy is used and no records will be visible.
By default, row security is applied at all times except for the
table owner and the superuser. A new GUC, row_security, is added
which can be set to ON, OFF, or FORCE. When set to FORCE, row
security will be applied even for the table owner and superusers.
When set to OFF, row security will be disabled when allowed and an
error will be thrown if the user does not have rights to bypass row
security.
Per discussion, pg_dump sets row_security = OFF by default to ensure
that exports and backups will have all data in the table or will
error if there are insufficient privileges to bypass row security.
A new option has been added to pg_dump, --enable-row-security, to
ask pg_dump to export with row security enabled.
A new role capability, BYPASSRLS, which can only be set by the
superuser, is added to allow other users to be able to bypass row
security using row_security = OFF.
Many thanks to the various individuals who have helped with the
design, particularly Robert Haas for his feedback.
Authors include Craig Ringer, KaiGai Kohei, Adam Brightwell, Dean
Rasheed, with additional changes and rework by me.
Reviewers have included all of the above, Greg Smith,
Jeff McCormick, and Robert Haas.
This new GUC context option allows GUC parameters to have the combined
properties of PGC_BACKEND and PGC_SUSET, ie, they don't change after
session start and non-superusers can't change them. This is a more
appropriate choice for log_connections and log_disconnections than their
previous context of PGC_BACKEND, because we don't want non-superusers
to be able to affect whether their sessions get logged.
Note: the behavior for log_connections is still a bit odd, in that when
a superuser attempts to set it from PGOPTIONS, the setting takes effect
but it's too late to enable or suppress connection startup logging.
It's debatable whether that's worth fixing, and in any case there is
a reasonable argument for PGC_SU_BACKEND to exist.
In passing, re-pgindent the files touched by this commit.
Fujii Masao, reviewed by Joe Conway and Amit Kapila
Previously replication commands like IDENTIFY_COMMAND were not logged
even when log_statements is set to all. Some users who want to audit
all types of statements were not satisfied with this situation. To
address the problem, this commit adds new GUC log_replication_commands.
If it's enabled, all replication commands are logged in the server log.
There are many ways to allow us to enable that logging. For example,
we can extend log_statement so that replication commands are logged
when it's set to all. But per discussion in the community, we reached
the consensus to add separate GUC for that.
Reviewed by Ian Barwick, Robert Haas and Heikki Linnakangas.
Peter Eisentraut
Robert Haas
Andres Freund
Tom Lane
Noah Misch
Alvaro Herrera
Jeff Davis
Joe Conway
Fujii Masao
Heikki Linnakangas
Stephen Frost
Bruce Momjian