There is a new API, RegisterDynamicBackgroundWorker, which allows
an ordinary user backend to register a new background writer during
normal running. This means that it's no longer necessary for all
background workers to be registered during processing of
shared_preload_libraries, although the option of registering workers
at that time remains available.
When a background worker exits and will not be restarted, the
slot previously used by that background worker is automatically
released and becomes available for reuse. Slots used by background
workers that are configured for automatic restart can't (yet) be
released without shutting down the system.
This commit adds a new source file, bgworker.c, and moves some
of the existing control logic for background workers there.
Previously, there was little enough logic that it made sense to
keep everything in postmaster.c, but not any more.
This commit also makes the worker_spi contrib module into an
extension and adds a new function, worker_spi_launch, which can
be used to demonstrate the new facility.
This patch replaces WALInsertLock with a number of WAL insertion slots,
allowing multiple backends to insert WAL records to the WAL buffers
concurrently. This is particularly useful for parallel loading large amounts
of data on a system with many CPUs.
This has one user-visible change: switching to a new WAL segment with
pg_switch_xlog() now fills the remaining unused portion of the segment with
zeros. This potentially adds some overhead, but it has been a very common
practice by DBA's to clear the "tail" of the segment with an external
pg_clearxlogtail utility anyway, to make the WAL files compress better.
With this patch, it's no longer necessary to do that.
This patch adds a new GUC, xloginsert_slots, to tune the number of WAL
insertion slots. Performance testing suggests that the default, 8, works
pretty well for all kinds of worklods, but I left the GUC in place to allow
others with different hardware to test that easily. We might want to remove
that before release.
Reviewed by Andres Freund.
When a backend needs to flush the WAL, and someone else is already flushing
the WAL, wait until it releases the WALInsertLock and check if we still need
to do the flush or if the other backend already did the work for us, before
acquiring WALInsertLock. This helps group commit, because when the WAL flush
finishes, all the backends that were waiting for it can be woken up in one
go, and the can all concurrently observe that they're done, rather than
waking them up one by one in a cascading fashion.
This is based on a new LWLock function, LWLockWaitUntilFree(), which has
peculiar semantics. If the lock is immediately free, it grabs the lock and
returns true. If it's not free, it waits until it is released, but then
returns false without grabbing the lock. This is used in XLogFlush(), so
that when the lock is acquired, the backend flushes the WAL, but if it's
not, the backend first checks the current flush location before retrying.
Original patch and benchmarking by Peter Geoghegan and Simon Riggs, although
this patch as committed ended up being very different from that.
If a standby is broadcasting reply messages and we have named
one or more standbys in synchronous_standby_names then allow
users who set synchronous_replication to wait for commit, which
then provides strict data integrity guarantees. Design avoids
sending and receiving transaction state information so minimises
bookkeeping overheads. We synchronize with the highest priority
standby that is connected and ready to synchronize. Other standbys
can be defined to takeover in case of standby failure.
This version has very strict behaviour; more relaxed options
may be added at a later date.
Simon Riggs and Fujii Masao, with reviews by Yeb Havinga, Jaime
Casanova, Heikki Linnakangas and Robert Haas, plus the assistance
of many other design reviewers.
Change the way UPDATEs are handled. Instead of maintaining a chain of
tuple-level locks in shared memory, copy any existing locks on the old
tuple to the new tuple at UPDATE. Any existing page-level lock needs to
be duplicated too, as a lock on the new tuple. That was neglected
previously.
Store xmin on tuple-level predicate locks, to distinguish a lock on an old
already-recycled tuple from a new tuple at the same physical location.
Failure to distinguish them caused loops in the tuple-lock chains, as
reported by YAMAMOTO Takashi. Although we don't use the chain representation
of UPDATEs anymore, it seems like a good idea to store the xmin to avoid
some false positives if no other reason.
CheckSingleTargetForConflictsIn now correctly handles the case where a lock
that's being held is not reflected in the local lock table. That happens
if another backend acquires a lock on our behalf due to an UPDATE or a page
split.
PredicateLockPageCombine now retains locks for the page that is being
removed, rather than removing them. This prevents a potentially dangerous
false-positive inconsistency where the local lock table believes that a lock
is held, but it is actually not.
Dan Ports and Kevin Grittner
Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.
To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.
A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.
Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.
We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
In addition, add support for a "payload" string to be passed along with
each notify event.
This implementation should be significantly more efficient than the old one,
and is also more compatible with Hot Standby usage. There is not yet any
facility for HS slaves to receive notifications generated on the master,
although such a thing is possible in future.
Joachim Wieland, reviewed by Jeff Davis; also hacked on by me.
of shared or nailed system catalogs. This has two key benefits:
* The new CLUSTER-based VACUUM FULL can be applied safely to all catalogs.
* We no longer have to use an unsafe reindex-in-place approach for reindexing
shared catalogs.
CLUSTER on nailed catalogs now works too, although I left it disabled on
shared catalogs because the resulting pg_index.indisclustered update would
only be visible in one database.
Since reindexing shared system catalogs is now fully transactional and
crash-safe, the former special cases in REINDEX behavior have been removed;
shared catalogs are treated the same as non-shared.
This commit does not do anything about the recently-discussed problem of
deadlocks between VACUUM FULL/CLUSTER on a system catalog and other
concurrent queries; will address that in a separate patch. As a stopgap,
parallel_schedule has been tweaked to run vacuum.sql by itself, to avoid
such failures during the regression tests.
As pointed out by ITAGAKI Takahiro, we split SInvalLock into two in 8.4,
so to keep the numbers of the rest of the locks unchanged from 8.3, we
don't need a placeholder.
free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each
relation (except for hash indexes; they don't use FSM).
This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC options; remove any
trace of them from the backend, initdb, and documentation.
Rewrite contrib/pg_freespacemap to match the new FSM implementation. Also
introduce a new variant of the get_raw_page(regclass, int4, int4) function in
contrib/pageinspect that let's you to return pages from any relation fork, and
a new fsm_page_contents() function to inspect the new FSM pages.
unnecessary cache resets. The major changes are:
* When the queue overflows, we only issue a cache reset to the specific
backend or backends that still haven't read the oldest message, rather
than resetting everyone as in the original coding.
* When we observe backend(s) falling well behind, we signal SIGUSR1
to only one backend, the one that is furthest behind and doesn't already
have a signal outstanding for it. When it finishes catching up, it will
in turn signal SIGUSR1 to the next-furthest-back guy, if there is one that
is far enough behind to justify a signal. The PMSIGNAL_WAKEN_CHILDREN
mechanism is removed.
* We don't attempt to clean out dead messages after every message-receipt
operation; rather, we do it on the insertion side, and only when the queue
fullness passes certain thresholds.
* Split SInvalLock into SInvalReadLock and SInvalWriteLock so that readers
don't block writers nor vice versa (except during the infrequent queue
cleanout operations).
* Transfer multiple sinval messages for each acquisition of a read or
write lock.
processes to be running simultaneously. Also, now autovacuum processes do not
count towards the max_connections limit; they are counted separately from
regular processes, and are limited by the new GUC variable
autovacuum_max_workers.
The launcher now has intelligence to launch workers on each database every
autovacuum_naptime seconds, limited only on the max amount of worker slots
available.
Also, the global worker I/O utilization is limited by the vacuum cost-based
delay feature. Workers are "balanced" so that the total I/O consumption does
not exceed the established limit. This part of the patch was contributed by
ITAGAKI Takahiro.
Per discussion.
are in their commit critical sections via flags in the ProcArray. Checkpoint
can watch the ProcArray to determine when it's safe to proceed. This is
a considerably better solution to the original problem of race conditions
between checkpoint and transaction commit: it speeds up commit, since there's
one less lock to fool with, and it prevents the problem of checkpoint being
delayed indefinitely when there's a constant flow of commits. Heikki, with
some kibitzing from Tom.
continuously, and requests vacuum runs of "autovacuum workers" to postmaster.
The workers do the actual vacuum work. This allows for future improvements,
like allowing multiple autovacuum jobs running in parallel.
For now, the code keeps the original behavior of having a single autovac
process at any time by sleeping until the previous worker has finished.
modules; the first try was not usable in EXEC_BACKEND builds (e.g.,
Windows). Instead, just provide some entry points to increase the
allocation requests during postmaster start, and provide a dedicated
LWLock that can be used to synchronize allocation operations performed
by backends. Per discussion with Marc Munro.
into a single mostly-physical-order scan of the index. This requires some
ticklish interlocking considerations, but should create no material
performance impact on normal index operations (at least given the
already-committed changes to make scans work a page at a time). VACUUM
itself should get significantly faster in any index that's degenerated to a
very nonlinear page order. Also, we save one pass over the index entirely,
except in the case where there were no deletions to do and so only one pass
happened anyway.
Original patch by Heikki Linnakangas, rework by Tom Lane.
occurs when it tries to heap_open pg_tablespace. When control returns to
smgrcreate, that routine will be holding a dangling pointer to a closed
SMgrRelation, resulting in mayhem. This is of course a consequence of
the violation of proper module layering inherent in having smgr.c call
a tablespace command routine, but the simplest fix seems to be to change
the locking mechanism. There's no real need for TablespaceCreateDbspace
to touch pg_tablespace at all --- it's only opening it as a way of locking
against a parallel DROP TABLESPACE command. A much better answer is to
create a special-purpose LWLock to interlock these two operations.
This drops TablespaceCreateDbspace quite a few layers down the food chain
and makes it something reasonably safe for smgr to call.
an LWLock instead of a spinlock. This hardly matters on Unix machines
but should improve startup performance on Windows (or any port using
EXEC_BACKEND). Per previous discussion.
reduce contention for the former single LockMgrLock. Per my recent
proposal. I set it up for 16 partitions, but on a pgbench test this
gives only a marginal further improvement over 4 partitions --- we need
to test more scenarios to choose the number of partitions.
to 'Size' (that is, size_t), and install overflow detection checks in it.
This allows us to remove the former arbitrary restrictions on NBuffers
etc. It won't make any difference in a 32-bit machine, but in a 64-bit
machine you could theoretically have terabytes of shared buffers.
(How efficiently we could manage 'em remains to be seen.) Similarly,
num_temp_buffers, work_mem, and maintenance_work_mem can be set above
2Gb on a 64-bit machine. Original patch from Koichi Suzuki, additional
work by moi.
communication structure, and make it its own module with its own lock.
This should reduce contention at least a little, and it definitely makes
the code seem cleaner. Per my recent proposal.
to eliminate unnecessary deadlocks. This commit adds SELECT ... FOR SHARE
paralleling SELECT ... FOR UPDATE. The implementation uses a new SLRU
data structure (managed much like pg_subtrans) to represent multiple-
transaction-ID sets. When more than one transaction is holding a shared
lock on a particular row, we create a MultiXactId representing that set
of transactions and store its ID in the row's XMAX. This scheme allows
an effectively unlimited number of row locks, just as we did before,
while not costing any extra overhead except when a shared lock actually
has to be shared. Still TODO: use the regular lock manager to control
the grant order when multiple backends are waiting for a row lock.
Alvaro Herrera and Tom Lane.
the freelist, plus per-buffer spinlocks that protect access to individual
shared buffer headers. This requires abandoning a global freelist (since
the freelist is a global contention point), which shoots down ARC and 2Q
as well as plain LRU management. Adopt a clock sweep algorithm instead.
Preliminary results show substantial improvement in multi-backend situations.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
updates are no longer WAL-logged nor even fsync'd; we do not need to,
since after a crash no old pg_subtrans data is needed again. We truncate
pg_subtrans to RecentGlobalXmin at each checkpoint. slru.c's API is
refactored a little bit to separate out the necessary decisions.
for transaction commits that occurred just before the checkpoint. This is
an EXTREMELY serious bug --- kudos to Satoshi Okada for creating a
reproducible test case to prove its existence.
Bruce Momjian
Tatsuo Ishii
Robert Haas
Heikki Linnakangas
Simon Riggs
Magnus Hagander
Tom Lane
Alvaro Herrera
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon