its usual buffer cleaning duties during archive recovery, and it's responsible
for performing restartpoints.
This requires some changes in postmaster. When the startup process has done
all the initialization and is ready to start WAL redo, it signals the
postmaster to launch the background writer. The postmaster is signaled again
when the point in recovery is reached where we know that the database is in
consistent state. Postmaster isn't interested in that at the moment, but
that's the point where we could let other backends in to perform read-only
queries. The postmaster is signaled third time when the recovery has ended,
so that postmaster knows that it's safe to start accepting connections.
The startup process now traps SIGTERM, and performs a "clean" shutdown. If
you do a fast shutdown during recovery, a shutdown restartpoint is performed,
like a shutdown checkpoint, and postmaster kills the processes cleanly. You
still have to continue the recovery at next startup, though.
Currently, the background writer is only launched during archive recovery.
We could launch it during crash recovery as well, but it seems better to keep
that codepath as simple as possible, for the sake of robustness. And it
couldn't do any restartpoints during crash recovery anyway, so it wouldn't be
that useful.
log_restartpoints is gone. Use log_checkpoints instead. This is yet to be
documented.
This whole operation is a pre-requisite for Hot Standby, but has some value of
its own whether the hot standby patch makes 8.4 or not.
Simon Riggs, with lots of modifications by me.
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.
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.
To this end, add a couple of columns to pg_class, relminxid and relvacuumxid,
based on which we calculate the pg_database columns after each vacuum.
We now force all databases to be vacuumed, even template ones. A backend
noticing too old a database (meaning pg_database.datminxid is in danger of
falling behind Xid wraparound) will signal the postmaster, which in turn will
start an autovacuum iteration to process the offending database. In principle
this is only there to cope with frozen (non-connectable) databases without
forcing users to set them to connectable, but it could force regular user
database to go through a database-wide vacuum at any time. Maybe we should
warn users about this somehow. Of course the real solution will be to use
autovacuum all the time ;-)
There are some additional improvements we could have in this area: for example
the vacuum code could be smarter about not updating pg_database for each table
when called by autovacuum, and do it only once the whole autovacuum iteration
is done.
I updated the system catalogs documentation, but I didn't modify the
maintenance section. Also having some regression tests for this would be nice
but it's not really a very straightforward thing to do.
Catalog version bumped due to system catalog changes.
syntactic conflicts, both privilege and role GRANT/REVOKE commands have
to use the same production for scanning the list of tokens that might
eventually turn out to be privileges or role names. So, change the
existing GRANT/REVOKE code to expect a list of strings not pre-reduced
AclMode values. Fix a couple other minor issues while at it, such as
InitializeAcl function name conflicting with a Windows system function.
than being random pieces of other files. Give bgwriter responsibility
for all checkpoint activity (other than a post-recovery checkpoint);
so this child process absorbs the functionality of the former transient
checkpoint and shutdown subprocesses. While at it, create an actual
include file for postmaster.c, which for some reason never had its own
file before.
(SIGUSR1, which we have not been using recently) instead of piggybacking
on SIGUSR2-driven NOTIFY processing. This has several good results:
the processing needed to drain the sinval queue is a lot less than the
processing needed to answer a NOTIFY; there's less contention since we
don't have a bunch of backends all trying to acquire exclusive lock on
pg_listener; backends that are sitting inside a transaction block can
still drain the queue, whereas NOTIFY processing can't run if there's
an open transaction block. (This last is a fairly serious issue that
I don't think we ever recognized before --- with clients like JDBC that
tend to sit with open transaction blocks, the sinval queue draining
mechanism never really worked as intended, probably resulting in a lot
of useless cache-reset overhead.) This is the last of several proposed
changes in response to Philip Warner's recent report of sinval-induced
performance problems.
so that only one signal number is used not three. Flags in shared
memory tell the reason(s) for the current signal. This method is
extensible to handle more signal reasons without chewing up even more
signal numbers, but the immediate reason is to keep pg_pwd reloads
separate from SIGHUP processing in the postmaster.
Also clean up some problems in the postmaster with delayed response to
checkpoint status changes --- basically, it wouldn't schedule a checkpoint
if it wasn't getting connection requests on a regular basis.
Heikki Linnakangas