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
Previously, if you wanted anything besides C-string hash keys, you had to
specify a custom hashing function to hash_create(). Nearly all such
callers were specifying tag_hash or oid_hash; which is tedious, and rather
error-prone, since a caller could easily miss the opportunity to optimize
by using hash_uint32 when appropriate. Replace this with a design whereby
callers using simple binary-data keys just specify HASH_BLOBS and don't
need to mess with specific support functions. hash_create() itself will
take care of optimizing when the key size is four bytes.
This nets out saving a few hundred bytes of code space, and offers
a measurable performance improvement in tidbitmap.c (which was not
exploiting the opportunity to use hash_uint32 for its 4-byte keys).
There might be some wins elsewhere too, I didn't analyze closely.
In future we could look into offering a similar optimized hashing function
for 8-byte keys. Under this design that could be done in a centralized
and machine-independent fashion, whereas getting it right for keys of
platform-dependent sizes would've been notationally painful before.
For the moment, the old way still works fine, so as not to break source
code compatibility for loadable modules. Eventually we might want to
remove tag_hash and friends from the exported API altogether, since there's
no real need for them to be explicitly referenced from outside dynahash.c.
Teodor Sigaev and Tom Lane
A fake relcache entry can "own" a SmgrRelation object, like a regular
relcache entry. But when it was free'd, the owner field in SmgrRelation
was not cleared, so it was left pointing to free'd memory.
Amazingly this apparently hasn't caused crashes in practice, or we would've
heard about it earlier. Andres found this with Valgrind.
Report and fix by Andres Freund, with minor modifications by me. Backpatch
to all supported versions.
When relations are dropped, at end of transaction we need to remove the
files and clean the buffer pool of buffers containing pages of those
relations. Previously we would scan the buffer pool once per relation
to clean up buffers. When there are many relations to drop, the
repeated scans make this process slow; so we now instead pass a list of
relations to drop and scan the pool once, checking each buffer against
the passed list. When the number of relations is larger than a
threshold (which as of this patch is being set to 20 relations) we sort
the array before starting, and bsearch the array; when it's smaller, we
simply scan the array linearly each time, because that's faster. The
exact optimal threshold value depends on many factors, but the
difference is not likely to be significant enough to justify making it
user-settable.
This has been measured to be a significant win (a 15x win when dropping
100,000 relations; an extreme case, but reportedly a real one).
Author: Tomas Vondra, some tweaks by me
Reviewed by: Robert Haas, Shigeru Hanada, Andres Freund, Álvaro Herrera
If an SMgrRelation is not "owned" by a relcache entry, don't allow it to
live past transaction end. This design allows the same SMgrRelation to be
used for blind writes of multiple blocks during a transaction, but ensures
that we don't hold onto such an SMgrRelation indefinitely. Because an
SMgrRelation typically corresponds to open file descriptors at the fd.c
level, leaving it open when there's no corresponding relcache entry can
mean that we prevent the kernel from reclaiming deleted disk space.
(While CacheInvalidateSmgr messages usually fix that, there are cases
where they're not issued, such as DROP DATABASE. We might want to add
some more sinval messaging for that, but I'd be inclined to keep this
type of logic anyway, since allowing VFDs to accumulate indefinitely
for blind-written relations doesn't seem like a good idea.)
This code replaces a previous attempt towards the same goal that proved
to be unreliable. Back-patch to 9.1 where the previous patch was added.
This reverts commit fba105b109.
That approach had problems with the smgr-level state not tracking what
we really want to happen, and with the VFD-level state not tracking the
smgr-level state very well either. In consequence, it was still possible
to hold kernel file descriptors open for long-gone tables (as in recent
report from Tore Halset), and yet there were also cases of FDs being closed
undesirably soon. A replacement implementation will follow.
We were sending one per fork, but a little bit of refactoring allows us
to send just one request with forknum == InvalidForkNumber. This not only
reduces pressure on the shared-memory request queue, but saves repeated
traversals of the checkpointer's hash table.
This provides a speedup of about 4X when NBuffers is large enough.
There is also a useful reduction in sinval traffic, since we
only do CacheInvalidateSmgr() once not once per fork.
Simon Riggs, reviewed and somewhat revised by Tom Lane
walsender.h should depend on xlog.h, not vice versa. (Actually, the
inclusion was circular until a couple hours ago, which was even sillier;
but Bruce broke it in the expedient rather than logically correct
direction.) Because of that poor decision, plus blind application of
pgrminclude, we had a situation where half the system was depending on
xlog.h to include such unrelated stuff as array.h and guc.h. Clean up
the header inclusion, and manually revert a lot of what pgrminclude had
done so things build again.
This episode reinforces my feeling that pgrminclude should not be run
without adult supervision. Inclusion changes in header files in particular
need to be reviewed with great care. More generally, it'd be good if we
had a clearer notion of module layering to dictate which headers can sanely
include which others ... but that's a big task for another day.
"Blind writes" are a mechanism to push buffers down to disk when
evicting them; since they may belong to different databases than the one
a backend is connected to, the backend does not necessarily have a
relation to link them to, and thus no way to blow them away. We were
keeping those files open indefinitely, which would cause a problem if
the underlying table was deleted, because the operating system would not
be able to reclaim the disk space used by those files.
To fix, have bufmgr mark such files as transient to smgr; the lower
layer is allowed to close the file descriptor when the current
transaction ends. We must be careful to have any other access of the
file to remove the transient markings, to prevent unnecessary expensive
system calls when evicting buffers belonging to our own database (which
files we're likely to require again soon.)
This commit fixes a bug in the previous one, which neglected to cleanly
handle the LRU ring that fd.c uses to manage open files, and caused an
unacceptable failure just before beta2 and was thus reverted.
"Blind writes" are a mechanism to push buffers down to disk when
evicting them; since they may belong to different databases than the one
a backend is connected to, the backend does not necessarily have a
relation to link them to, and thus no way to blow them away. We were
keeping those files open indefinitely, which would cause a problem if
the underlying table was deleted, because the operating system would not
be able to reclaim the disk space used by those files.
To fix, have bufmgr mark such files as transient to smgr; the lower
layer is allowed to close the file descriptor when the current
transaction ends. We must be careful to have any other access of the
file to remove the transient markings, to prevent unnecessary expensive
system calls when evicting buffers belonging to our own database (which
files we're likely to require again soon.)
This allows us to reliably remove all leftover temporary relation
files on cluster startup without reference to system catalogs or WAL;
therefore, we no longer include temporary relations in XLOG_XACT_COMMIT
and XLOG_XACT_ABORT WAL records.
Since these changes require including a backend ID in each
SharedInvalSmgrMsg, the size of the SharedInvalidationMessage.id
field has been reduced from two bytes to one, and the maximum number
of connections has been reduced from INT_MAX / 4 to 2^23-1. It would
be possible to remove these restrictions by increasing the size of
SharedInvalidationMessage by 4 bytes, but right now that doesn't seem
like a good trade-off.
Review by Jaime Casanova and Tom Lane.
Move rd_targblock, rd_fsm_nblocks, and rd_vm_nblocks from relcache to the smgr
relation entries, so that they will get reset to InvalidBlockNumber whenever
an smgr-level flush happens. Because we now send smgr invalidation messages
immediately (not at end of transaction) when a relation truncation occurs,
this ensures that other backends will reset their values before they next
access the relation. We no longer need the unreliable assumption that a
VACUUM that's doing a truncation will hold its AccessExclusive lock until
commit --- in fact, we can intentionally release that lock as soon as we've
completed the truncation. This patch therefore reverts (most of) Alvaro's
patch of 2009-11-10, as well as my marginal hacking on it yesterday. We can
also get rid of assorted no-longer-needed relcache flushes, which are far more
expensive than an smgr flush because they kill a lot more state.
In passing this patch fixes smgr_redo's failure to perform visibility-map
truncation, and cleans up some rather dubious assumptions in freespace.c and
visibilitymap.c about when rd_fsm_nblocks and rd_vm_nblocks can be out of
date.
the relfilenode of currently-not-relocatable system catalogs.
1. Get rid of inval.c's dependency on relfilenode, by not having it emit
smgr invalidations as a result of relcache flushes. Instead, smgr sinval
messages are sent directly from smgr.c when an actual relation delete or
truncate is done. This makes considerably more structural sense and allows
elimination of a large number of useless smgr inval messages that were
formerly sent even in cases where nothing was changing at the
physical-relation level. Note that this reintroduces the concept of
nontransactional inval messages, but that's okay --- because the messages
are sent by smgr.c, they will be sent in Hot Standby slaves, just from a
lower logical level than before.
2. Move setNewRelfilenode out of catalog/index.c, where it never logically
belonged, into relcache.c; which is a somewhat debatable choice as well but
better than before. (I considered catalog/storage.c, but that seemed too
low level.) Rename to RelationSetNewRelfilenode.
3. Cosmetic cleanups of some other relfilenode manipulations.
GUC variable effective_io_concurrency controls how many concurrent block
prefetch requests will be issued.
(The best way to handle this for plain index scans is still under debate,
so that part is not applied yet --- tgl)
Greg Stark
truncations in FSM code, call FreeSpaceMapTruncateRel from smgr_redo. To
make that cleaner from modularity point of view, move the WAL-logging one
level up to RelationTruncate, and move RelationTruncate and all the
related WAL-logging to new src/backend/catalog/storage.c file. Introduce
new RelationCreateStorage and RelationDropStorage functions that are used
instead of calling smgrcreate/smgrscheduleunlink directly. Move the
pending rel deletion stuff from smgrcreate/smgrscheduleunlink to the new
functions. This leaves smgr.c as a thin wrapper around md.c; all the
transactional stuff is now in storage.c.
This will make it easier to add new forks with similar truncation logic,
like the visibility map.
"base/11517/3767_fsm", instead of symbolic names like "1663/11517/3767/1",
per Alvaro's suggestion. I didn't change the messages in the higher-level
index, heap and FSM routines, though, where the fork is implicit.
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.
of multiple forks, and each fork can be created and grown separately.
The bulk of this patch is about changing the smgr API to include an extra
ForkNumber argument in every smgr function. Also, smgrscheduleunlink and
smgrdounlink no longer implicitly call smgrclose, because other forks might
still exist after unlinking one. The callers of those functions have been
modified to call smgrclose instead.
This patch in itself doesn't have any user-visible effect, but provides the
infrastructure needed for upcoming patches. The additional forks envisioned
are a rewritten FSM implementation that doesn't rely on a fixed-size shared
memory block, and a visibility map to allow skipping portions of a table in
VACUUM that have no dead tuples.
forks. XLogOpenRelation() and the associated light-weight relation cache in
xlogutils.c is gone, and XLogReadBuffer() now takes a RelFileNode as argument,
instead of Relation.
For functions that still need a Relation struct during WAL replay, there's a
new function called CreateFakeRelcacheEntry() that returns a fake entry like
XLogOpenRelation() used to.
checkpoint. This guards against an unlikely data-loss scenario in which
we re-use the relfilenode, then crash, then replay the deletion and
recreation of the file. Even then we'd be OK if all insertions into the
new relation had been WAL-logged ... but that's not guaranteed given all
the no-WAL-logging optimizations that have recently been added.
Patch by Heikki Linnakangas, per a discussion last month.
rows will normally never obtain an XID at all. We already did things this way
for subtransactions, but this patch extends the concept to top-level
transactions. In applications where there are lots of short read-only
transactions, this should improve performance noticeably; not so much from
removal of the actual XID-assignments, as from reduction of overhead that's
driven by the rate of XID consumption. We add a concept of a "virtual
transaction ID" so that active transactions can be uniquely identified even
if they don't have a regular XID. This is a much lighter-weight concept:
uniqueness of VXIDs is only guaranteed over the short term, and no on-disk
record is made about them.
Florian Pflug, with some editorialization by Tom.
truncated relation was deleted later in the WAL sequence. Since replay
normally auto-creates a relation upon its first reference by a WAL log entry,
failure is seen only if the truncate entry happens to be the first reference
after the checkpoint we're restarting from; which is a pretty unusual case but
of course not impossible. Fix by making truncate entries auto-create like
the other ones do. Per report and test case from Dharmendra Goyal.
we don't know at that point which relation OID to tell pgstat to forget.
The code was passing the relfilenode, which is incorrect, and could possibly
cause some other relation's stats to be zeroed out. While we could try to
clean this up, it seems much simpler and more reliable to let the next
invocation of pgstat_vacuum_tabstat() fix things; which indeed is how it
worked before I introduced the buggy code into 8.1.3 and later :-(.
Problem noticed by Itagaki Takahiro, fix is per subsequent discussion.
having md.c return a success/failure boolean to smgr.c, which was just going
to elog anyway, let md.c issue the elog messages itself. This allows better
error reporting, particularly in cases such as "short read" or "short write"
which Peter was complaining of. Also, remove the kluge of allowing mdread()
to return zeroes from a read-beyond-EOF: this is now an error condition
except when InRecovery or zero_damaged_pages = true. (Hash indexes used to
require that behavior, but no more.) Also, enforce that mdwrite() is to be
used for rewriting existing blocks while mdextend() is to be used for
extending the relation EOF. This restriction lets us get rid of the old
ad-hoc defense against creating huge files by an accidental reference to
a bogus block number: we'll only create new segments in mdextend() not
mdwrite() or mdread(). (Again, when InRecovery we allow it anyway, since
we need to allow updates of blocks that were later truncated away.)
Also, clean up the original makeshift patch for bug #2737: move the
responsibility for padding relation segments to full length into md.c.
update no-longer-existing pages to fall through as no-ops, but make a note
of each page number referenced by such records. If we don't see a later
XLOG entry dropping the table or truncating away the page, complain at
the end of XLOG replay. Since this fixes the known failure mode for
full_page_writes = off, revert my previous band-aid patch that disabled
that GUC variable.
startup or recovery process. Since such a process isn't a real backend,
pgstat.c gets confused. This accounts for recent reports of strange
"invalid server process ID -1" log messages during crash recovery.
There isn't any point in attempting to make the report, since we'll discard
stats in such scenarios anyhow.
when an error occurs during xlog replay. Also, replace the former risky
'write into a fixed-size buffer with no overflow detection' API for XLOG
record description routines; use an expansible StringInfo instead. (The
latter accounts for most of the patch bulk.)
Qingqing Zhou
Andres Freund
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Heikki Linnakangas
Alvaro Herrera
Magnus Hagander
Robert Haas