Before 955a684e04 logical decoding snapshot maintenance needed to
cope with transactions it might not have seen in their entirety. For
such transactions we'd to assume they modified the catalog (could have
happened before we were watching), and thus a new snapshot had to be
built, and distributed to concurrently running transactions.
That's problematic because building a new snapshot isn't that cheap ,
especially as the the array of committed transactions needs to be
sorted. When creating a slot on a server with a lot of transactions,
this could make logical slot creation infeasibly expensive.
After 955a684e04 there's no need to deal with transaction that
aren't guaranteed to be fully observable. That allows to avoid
building snapshots for transactions that haven't modified catalog,
even before reaching consistency.
While this isn't necessarily a bugfix, slot creation being impossible
in some production workloads, is severe enough to warrant
backpatching.
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
524dbc1433