The snapshot assembly during the creation of logical slots relied
waiting for transactions in xl_running_xacts to end, by checking for
their commit/abort records. Unfortunately, despite locking, it is
possible to see an xl_running_xact record listing transactions as
ready, that have already WAL-logged an commit/abort record, as the
locking just prevents the ProcArray to be adjusted, and the commit
record has to be logged first.
That lead to either delayed or hanging snapshot creation, because
snapbuild.c would wait "forever" to see commit/abort records for some
transactions. That hang resolved only if a xl_running_xacts record
without any running transactions happened to be logged, far from
certain on a busy server.
It's impractical to prevent that via more heavyweight locking, the
likelihood of deadlocks and significantly increased contention would
be too big.
Instead change the initial snapshot creation to be solely based on
tracking the oldest running transaction via
xl_running_xacts->oldestRunningXid - that actually ends up
significantly simplifying the code. That has two disadvantages:
1) Because we cannot fully "trust" the contents of xl_running_xacts,
we cannot use it to build the initial snapshot. Instead we have to
wait twice for all running transactions to finish.
2) Previously a slot, unless the race occurred, could be created when
the all transaction perceived as running based on commit/abort
records, now we have to wait for the next xl_running_xacts record.
To address that, trigger logging new xl_running_xacts record from
within snapbuild.c exactly when necessary.
Unfortunately snabuild.c's SnapBuild is stored on disk, one of the
stupider ideas of a certain Mr Freund, so we can't change it in a
minor release. As this is going to be backpatched, we have to hack
around a bit to keep on-disk compatibility. A later commit will
rejigger that on master.
Author: Andres Freund, based on a quite different patch from Petr Jelinek
Analyzed-By: Petr Jelinek
Reviewed-By: Petr Jelinek
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/f37e975c-908f-858e-707f-058d3b1eb214@2ndquadrant.com
Backpatch: 9.4-, where logical decoding has been introduced
Use "a" and "an" correctly, mostly in comments. Two error messages were
also fixed (they were just elogs, so no translation work required). Two
function comments in pg_proc.h were also fixed. Etsuro Fujita reported one
of these, but I found a lot more with grep.
Also fix a few other typos spotted while grepping for the a/an typos.
For example, "consists out of ..." -> "consists of ...". Plus a "though"/
"through" mixup reported by Euler Taveira.
Many of these typos were in old code, which would be nice to backpatch to
make future backpatching easier. But much of the code was new, and I didn't
feel like crafting separate patches for each branch. So no backpatching.
Heikki noticed in 544E23C0.8090605@vmware.com that slot.c and
snapbuild.c were missing the FIN_CRC32 call when computing/checking
checksums of on disk files. That doesn't lower the the error detection
capabilities of the checksum, but is inconsistent with other usages.
In a followup mail Heikki also noticed that, contrary to a comment,
the 'version' and 'length' struct fields of replication slot's on disk
data where not covered by the checksum. That's not likely to lead to
actually missed corruption as those fields are cross checked with the
expected version and the actual file length. But it's wrong
nonetheless.
As fixing these issues makes existing on disk files unreadable, bump
the expected versions of on disk files for both slots and logical
decoding historic catalog snapshots. This means that loading old
files will fail with
ERROR: "replication slot file ... has unsupported version 1"
and
ERROR: "snapbuild state file ... has unsupported version 1 instead of
2" respectively. Given the low likelihood of anybody already using
these new features in a production setup that seems acceptable.
Fixing these issues made me notice that there's no regression test
covering the loading of historic snapshot from disk - so add one.
Backpatch to 9.4 where these features were introduced.
Andres Freund
Heikki Linnakangas