In this mode, the master waits for the transaction to be applied on
the remote side, not just written to disk. That means that you can
count on a transaction started on the standby to see all commits
previously acknowledged by the master.
To make this work, the standby sends a reply after replaying each
commit record generated with synchronous_commit >= 'remote_apply'.
This introduces a small inefficiency: the extra replies will be sent
even by standbys that aren't the current synchronous standby. But
previously-existing synchronous_commit levels make no attempt at all
to optimize which replies are sent based on what the primary cares
about, so this is no worse, and at least avoids any extra replies for
people not using the feature at all.
Thomas Munro, reviewed by Michael Paquier and by me. Some additional
tweaks by me.
The distinction between "archive" and "hot_standby" existed only because
at the time "hot_standby" was added, there was some uncertainty about
stability. This is now a long time ago. We would like to move forward
with simplifying the replication configuration, but this distinction is
in the way, because a primary server cannot tell (without asking a
standby or predicting the future) which one of these would be the
appropriate level.
Pick a new name for the combined setting to make it clearer that it
covers all (non-logical) backup and replication uses. The old values
are still accepted but are converted internally.
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: David Steele <david@pgmasters.net>
Renaming a file using rename(2) is not guaranteed to be durable in face
of crashes. Use the previously added durable_rename()/durable_link_or_rename()
in various places where we previously just renamed files.
Most of the changed call sites are arguably not critical, but it seems
better to err on the side of too much durability. The most prominent
known case where the previously missing fsyncs could cause data loss is
crashes at the end of a checkpoint. After the actual checkpoint has been
performed, old WAL files are recycled. When they're filled, their
contents are fdatasynced, but we did not fsync the containing
directory. An OS/hardware crash in an unfortunate moment could then end
up leaving that file with its old name, but new content; WAL replay
would thus not replay it.
Reported-By: Tomas Vondra
Author: Michael Paquier, Tomas Vondra, Andres Freund
Discussion: 56583BDD.9060302@2ndquadrant.com
Backpatch: All supported branches
Previously recovery_min_apply_delay was applied even before recovery
had reached consistency. This could cause us to wait a long time
unexpectedly for read-only connections to be allowed. It's problematic
because the standby was useless during that wait time.
This patch changes recovery_min_apply_delay so that it's applied once
the database has reached the consistent state. That is, even if the delay
is set, the standby tries to replay WAL records as fast as possible until
it has reached consistency.
Author: Michael Paquier
Reviewed-By: Julien Rouhaud
Reported-By: Greg Clough
Backpatch: 9.4, where recovery_min_apply_delay was added
Bug: #13770
Discussion: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20151111155006.2644.84564@wrigleys.postgresql.org
Commit 4de82f7d7 increased the WAL flush rate, mainly to increase the
likelihood that hint bits can be set quickly. More quickly set hint bits
can reduce contention around the clog et al. But unfortunately the
increased flush rate can have a significant negative performance impact,
I have measured up to a factor of ~4. The reason for this slowdown is
that if there are independent writes to the underlying devices, for
example because shared buffers is a lot smaller than the hot data set,
or because a checkpoint is ongoing, the fdatasync() calls force cache
flushes to be emitted to the storage.
This is achieved by flushing WAL only if the last flush was longer than
wal_writer_delay ago, or if more than wal_writer_flush_after (new GUC)
unflushed blocks are pending. Based on some tests the default for
wal_writer_delay is 1MB, which seems to work well both on SSD and
rotational media.
To avoid negative performance impact due to 4de82f7d7 an earlier
commit (db76b1e) made SetHintBits() more likely to succeed; preventing
performance regressions in the pgbench tests I performed.
Discussion: 20160118163908.GW10941@awork2.anarazel.de
NextXID has been rendered in the form of a pg_lsn even though it
really is not. This can cause confusion, so change the format from
%u/%u to %u:%u, per discussion on hackers.
Complaint by me, patch by me and Bruce, reviewed by Michael Paquier
and Alvaro. Applied to HEAD only.
Author: Joe Conway, Bruce Momjian
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera
Backpatch-through: master
Historically this message has been emitted at the end of ShutdownXLOG().
That's not an insane place for it in a standalone backend, but in the
postmaster environment we've grown a fair amount of stuff that happens
later, including archiver/walsender shutdown, stats collector shutdown,
etc. Recent buildfarm experimentation showed that on slower machines
there could be many seconds' delay between finishing ShutdownXLOG() and
actual postmaster exit. That's fairly confusing, both for testing
purposes and for DBAs. Hence, move the code that prints this message
into UnlinkLockFiles(), so that it comes out just after we remove the
postmaster's pidfile. That is a more appropriate definition of "is shut
down" from the point of view of "pg_ctl stop", for example. In general,
removing the pidfile should be the last externally-visible action of
either a postmaster or a standalone backend; compare commit
d73d14c271 for instance. So this seems
like a reasonably future-proof approach.
Early returns from the buildfarm show that there's a bit of a gap in the
logging I added in 3971f64843b02e4a: the portion of CreateCheckPoint()
after CheckPointGuts() can take a fair amount of time. Add a few more
log messages in that section of code. This too shall be reverted later.
This is a quick hack, due to be reverted when its purpose has been served,
to try to gather information about why some of the buildfarm critters
regularly fail with "postmaster does not shut down" complaints. Maybe they
are just really overloaded, but maybe something else is going on. Hence,
instrument pg_ctl to print the current time when it starts waiting for
postmaster shutdown and when it gives up, and add a lot of logging of the
current time in the server's checkpoint and shutdown code paths.
No attempt has been made to make this pretty. I'm not even totally sure
if it will build on Windows, but we'll soon find out.
2PC state info is written only to WAL at PREPARE, then read back from WAL at
COMMIT PREPARED/ABORT PREPARED. Prepared transactions that live past one bufmgr
checkpoint cycle will be written to disk in the same form as previously. Crash
recovery path is not altered. Measured performance gains of 50-100% for short
2PC transactions by completely avoiding writing files and fsyncing. Other
optimizations still available, further patches in related areas expected.
Stas Kelvich and heavily edited by Simon Riggs
Based upon earlier ideas and patches by Michael Paquier and Heikki Linnakangas,
a concrete example of how Postgres-XC has fed back ideas into PostgreSQL.
Reviewed by Michael Paquier, Jeff Janes and Andres Freund
Performance testing by Jesper Pedersen
The variables newestCommitTs and oldestCommitTs sound as if they are
timestamps, but in fact they are the transaction Ids that correspond
to the newest and oldest timestamps rather than the actual timestamps.
Rename these variables to reflect that they are actually xids: to wit
newestCommitTsXid and oldestCommitTsXid respectively. Also modify
related code in a similar fashion, particularly the user facing output
emitted by pg_controldata and pg_resetxlog.
Complaint and patch by me, review by Tom Lane and Alvaro Herrera.
Backpatch to 9.5 where these variables were first introduced.
It's a bit cumbersome to use LWLockNewTrancheId(), because the returned
value needs to be shared between backends so that each backend can call
LWLockRegisterTranche() with the correct ID. So, for built-in tranches,
use a hard-coded value instead.
This is motivated by an upcoming patch adding further built-in tranches.
Andres Freund and Robert Haas
This module needs explicit initialization in order to replay WAL records
in recovery, but we had broken this recently following changes to make
other (stranger) scenarios work correctly. To fix, rework the
initialization sequence so that it always takes place before WAL replay
commences for both master and standby.
I could have gone for a more localized fix that just added a "startup"
call for the master server, but it seemed better to restructure the
existing callers as well so that the whole thing made more sense. As a
drawback, there is more control logic in xlog.c now than previously, but
doing otherwise meant passing down the ControlFile flag, which seemed
uglier as a whole.
This also meant adding a check to not re-execute ActivateCommitTs if it
had already been called.
Reported by Fujii Masao.
Backpatch to 9.5.
As pointed out by Fujii Masao, we weren't quite there on a standby
behaving sanely: first because we were failing to acquire the correct
state in the case where no XLOG_PARAMETER_CHANGE message was sent
(because a checkpoint had already happened after the setting was changed
in the master, and then the standby was restarted); and second because
promoting the standby with the feature enabled failed to activate it if
the master had the feature disabled.
This patch fixes both those misbehaviors hopefully without
re-introducing any old problems.
Also change the hint emitted in a standby together with the error
message about the feature being disabled, to make it point out that the
place to chance the setting is the master. Otherwise, if the setting is
already enabled in the standby, it is very confusing to have it say that
the setting must be enabled ...
Authors: Álvaro Herrera, Petr Jelínek.
Backpatch to 9.5.
Module initialization was still not completely correct after commit
6b61955135, per crash report from Takashi Ohnishi. To fix, instead of
trying to monkey around with the value of the GUC setting directly, add
a separate boolean flag that enables the feature on a standby, but only
for the startup (recovery) process, when it sees that its master server
has the feature enabled.
Discussion: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/ca44c6c7f9314868bdc521aea4f77cbf@MP-MSGSS-MBX004.msg.nttdata.co.jp
Also change the deactivation routine to delete all segment files rather
than leaving the last one around. (This doesn't need separate
WAL-logging, because on recovery we execute the same deactivation
routine anyway.)
In passing, clean up the code structure somewhat, particularly so that
xlog.c doesn't know so much about when to activate/deactivate the
feature.
Thanks to Fujii Masao for testing and Petr Jelínek for off-list discussion.
Back-patch to 9.5, where commit_ts was introduced.
There are three main changes here:
1. No longer cause a start failure in a standby if the feature is
disabled in postgresql.conf but enabled in the master. This reverts one
part of commit 4f3924d9cd43; what we keep is the ability of the standby
to activate/deactivate the module (which includes creating and removing
segments as appropriate) during replay of such actions in the master.
2. Replay WAL records affecting commitTS even if the feature is
disabled. This means the standby will always have the same state as the
master after replay.
3. Have COMMIT PREPARE record the transaction commit time as well. We
were previously only applying it in the normal transaction commit path.
Author: Petr Jelínek
Discussion: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAHGQGwHereDzzzmfxEBYcVQu3oZv6vZcgu1TPeERWbDc+gQ06g@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAHGQGwFuzfO4JscM9LCAmCDCxp_MfLvN4QdB+xWsS-FijbjTYQ@mail.gmail.com
Additionally, I cleaned up nearby code related to replication origins,
which I found a bit hard to follow, and fixed a couple of typos.
Backpatch to 9.5, where this code was introduced.
Per bug reports from Fujii Masao and subsequent discussion.
In 9.5 and master there is no need to support legacy truncation. This is
just committed separately to make it easier to backpatch the WAL logged
multixact truncation to 9.3 and 9.4 if we later decide to do so.
I bumped master's magic from 0xD086 to 0xD088 and 9.5's from 0xD085 to
0xD087 to avoid 9.5 reusing a value that has been in use on master while
keeping the numbers increasing between major versions.
Discussion: 20150621192409.GA4797@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 9.5
The fact that multixact truncations are not WAL logged has caused a fair
share of problems. Amongst others it requires to do computations during
recovery while the database is not in a consistent state, delaying
truncations till checkpoints, and handling members being truncated, but
offset not.
We tried to put bandaids on lots of these issues over the last years,
but it seems time to change course. Thus this patch introduces WAL
logging for multixact truncations.
This allows:
1) to perform the truncation directly during VACUUM, instead of delaying it
to the checkpoint.
2) to avoid looking at the offsets SLRU for truncation during recovery,
we can just use the master's values.
3) simplify a fair amount of logic to keep in memory limits straight,
this has gotten much easier
During the course of fixing this a bunch of additional bugs had to be
fixed:
1) Data was not purged from memory the member's SLRU before deleting
segments. This happened to be hard or impossible to hit due to the
interlock between checkpoints and truncation.
2) find_multixact_start() relied on SimpleLruDoesPhysicalPageExist - but
that doesn't work for offsets that haven't yet been flushed to
disk. Add code to flush the SLRUs to fix. Not pretty, but it feels
slightly safer to only make decisions based on actual on-disk state.
3) find_multixact_start() could be called concurrently with a truncation
and thus fail. Via SetOffsetVacuumLimit() that could lead to a round
of emergency vacuuming. The problem remains in
pg_get_multixact_members(), but that's quite harmless.
For now this is going to only get applied to 9.5+, leaving the issues in
the older branches in place. It is quite possible that we need to
backpatch at a later point though.
For the case this gets backpatched we need to handle that an updated
standby may be replaying WAL from a not-yet upgraded primary. We have to
recognize that situation and use "old style" truncation (i.e. looking at
the SLRUs) during WAL replay. In contrast to before, this now happens in
the startup process, when replaying a checkpoint record, instead of the
checkpointer. Doing truncation in the restartpoint is incorrect, they
can happen much later than the original checkpoint, thereby leading to
wraparound. To avoid "multixact_redo: unknown op code 48" errors
standbys would have to be upgraded before primaries.
A later patch will bump the WAL page magic, and remove the legacy
truncation codepaths. Legacy truncation support is just included to make
a possible future backpatch easier.
Discussion: 20150621192409.GA4797@alap3.anarazel.de
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas, Alvaro Herrera, Thomas Munro
Backpatch: 9.5 for now
This patch changes the log message which is logged when the server
successfully renames backup_label file to *.old but fails to rename
tablespace_map file during the shutdown. Previously the WARNING
message "online backup mode was not canceled" was logged in that case.
However this message is confusing because the backup mode is treated
as canceled whenever backup_label is successfully renamed. So this
commit makes the server log the message "online backup mode canceled"
in that case.
Also this commit changes errdetail messages so that they follow the
error message style guide.
Back-patch to 9.5 where tablespace_map file is introduced.
Original patch by Amit Kapila, heavily modified by me.
This commit makes postmaster forcibly remove the files signaling
a standby promotion request. Otherwise, the existence of those files
can trigger a promotion too early, whether a user wants that or not.
This removal of files is usually unnecessary because they can exist
only during a few moments during a standby promotion. However
there is a race condition: if pg_ctl promote is executed and creates
the files during a promotion, the files can stay around even after
the server is brought up to new master. Then, if new standby starts
by using the backup taken from that master, the files can exist
at the server startup and should be removed in order to avoid
an unexpected promotion.
Back-patch to 9.1 where promote signal file was introduced.
Problem reported by Feike Steenbergen.
Original patch by Michael Paquier, modified by me.
Discussion: 20150528100705.4686.91426@wrigleys.postgresql.org
The setting values of some parameters including max_worker_processes
must be equal to or higher than the values on the master. However,
previously max_worker_processes was not listed as such parameter
in the document. So this commit adds it to that list.
Back-patch to 9.4 where max_worker_processes was added.
If tablespace_map file is present without backup_label file, there is
no use of such file. There is no harm in retaining it, but it is better
to get rid of the map file so that we don't have any redundant file
in data directory and it will avoid any sort of confusion. It seems
prudent though to just rename the file out of the way rather than
delete it completely, also we ignore any error that occurs in rename
operation as even if map file is present without backup_label file,
it is harmless.
Back-patch to 9.5 where tablespace_map file was introduced.
Amit Kapila, reviewed by Robert Haas, Alvaro Herrera and me.
If a call to WaitForXLogInsertionsToFinish() returned a value in the middle
of a page, and another backend then started to insert a record to the same
page, and then you called WaitXLogInsertionsToFinish() again, the second
call might return a smaller value than the first call. The problem was in
GetXLogBuffer(), which always updated the insertingAt value to the
beginning of the requested page, not the actual requested location. Because
of that, the second call might return a xlog pointer to the beginning of
the page, while the first one returned a later position on the same page.
XLogFlush() performs two calls to WaitXLogInsertionsToFinish() in
succession, and holds WALWriteLock on the second call, which can deadlock
if the second call to WaitXLogInsertionsToFinish() blocks.
Reported by Spiros Ioannou. Backpatch to 9.4, where the more scalable
WALInsertLock mechanism, and this bug, was introduced.
The lwlock scalability work introduced two race conditions into the
lwlock variable support provided for xlog.c. First, and harmlessly on
most platforms, it set/read the variable without the spinlock in some
places. Secondly, due to the removal of the spinlock, it was possible
that a backend missed changes to the variable's state if it changed in
the wrong moment because checking the lock's state, the variable's state
and the queuing are not protected by a single spinlock acquisition
anymore.
To fix first move resetting the variable's from LWLockAcquireWithVar to
WALInsertLockRelease, via a new function LWLockReleaseClearVar. That
prevents issues around waiting for a variable's value to change when a
new locker has acquired the lock, but not yet set the value. Secondly
re-check that the variable hasn't changed after enqueing, that prevents
the issue that the lock has been released and already re-acquired by the
time the woken up backend checks for the lock's state.
Reported-By: Jeff Janes
Analyzed-By: Heikki Linnakangas
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas
Discussion: 5592DB35.2060401@iki.fi
Backpatch: 9.5, where the lwlock scalability went in
Patch by David Rowley. Backpatch to 9.5, as some of the calls were new in
9.5, and keeping the code in sync with master makes future backpatching
easier.
XLogFileCopy() was changed heavily in commit de76884. However it was
partially reverted in commit 7abc685 and most of those changes to
XLogFileCopy() were no longer needed. Then commit 7cbee7c removed
those unnecessary code, but XLogFileCopy() looked different in master
and 9.4 though the contents are almost the same.
This patch makes XLogFileCopy() look the same in master and back-branches,
which makes back-patching easier, per discussion on pgsql-hackers.
Back-patch to 9.5.
Discussion: 55760844.7090703@iki.fi
Michael Paquier
When archive recovery and restartpoints were initially introduced,
checkpoint_segments was ignored on the grounds that the files restored from
archive don't consume any space in the recovery server. That was changed in
later releases, but even then it was arguably a feature rather than a bug,
as performing restartpoints as often as checkpoints during normal operation
might be excessive, but you might nevertheless not want to waste a lot of
space for pre-allocated WAL by setting checkpoint_segments to a high value.
But now that we have separate min_wal_size and max_wal_size settings, you
can bound WAL usage with max_wal_size, and still avoid consuming excessive
space usage by setting min_wal_size to a lower value, so that argument is
moot.
There are still some issues with actually limiting the space usage to
max_wal_size: restartpoints in recovery can only start after seeing the
checkpoint record, while a checkpoint starts flushing buffers as soon as
the redo-pointer is set. Restartpoint is paced to happen at the same
leisurily speed, determined by checkpoint_completion_target, as checkpoints,
but because they are started later, max_wal_size can be exceeded by upto
one checkpoint cycle's worth of WAL, depending on
checkpoint_completion_target. But that seems better than not trying at all,
and max_wal_size is a soft limit anyway.
The documentation already claimed that max_wal_size is obeyed in recovery,
so this just fixes the behaviour to match the docs. However, add some
weasel-words there to mention that max_wal_size may well be exceeded by
some amount in recovery.
Don't apply rmtree(), which will gleefully remove an entire subtree,
and don't even apply unlink() unless it's symlink or a directory,
the only things that we expect to find.
Amit Kapila, with minor tweaks by me, per extensive discussions
involving Andrew Dunstan, Fujii Masao, and Heikki Linnakangas,
at least some of whom also reviewed the code.
9a20a9b2 added a new elog(), enabled when WAL_DEBUG is defined. The
other WAL_DEBUG dependant messages check for the wal_debug GUC, but this
one did not. While at it replace 'upto' with 'up to'.
Discussion: 20150610110253.GF3832@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch to 9.4, the first release containing 9a20a9b2.
* Remove unused argument "dstfname" and related code from XLogFileCopy().
* Previously XLogFileCopy() returned a pstrdup'd string so that
InstallXLogFileSegment() used it later. Since the pstrdup'd string was never
free'd, there could be a risk of memory leak. It was almost harmless because
the startup process exited just after calling XLogFileCopy(), it existed.
This commit changes XLogFileCopy() so that it directly calls
InstallXLogFileSegment() and doesn't call pstrdup() at all. Which fixes that
memory leak problem.
* Extend InstallXLogFileSegment() so that the caller can specify the log level.
Which allows us to emit an error when InstallXLogFileSegment() fails a disk
file access like link() and rename(). Previously it was always logged with
LOG level and additionally needed to be logged with ERROR when we wanted
to treat it as an error.
Michael Paquier
HotStandbyActiveInReplay, introduced in 061b079f, only allowed WAL
replay to happen in the startup process, missing the single user case.
This buglet is fairly harmless as it only causes problems when single
user mode in an assertion enabled build is used to replay a btree vacuum
record.
Backpatch to 9.2. 061b079f was backpatched further, but the assertion
was not.
Commit 2ce439f337 introduced a rather serious
regression, namely that if its scan of the data directory came across any
un-fsync-able files, it would fail and thereby prevent database startup.
Worse yet, symlinks to such files also caused the problem, which meant that
crash restart was guaranteed to fail on certain common installations such
as older Debian.
After discussion, we agreed that (1) failure to start is worse than any
consequence of not fsync'ing is likely to be, therefore treat all errors
in this code as nonfatal; (2) we should not chase symlinks other than
those that are expected to exist, namely pg_xlog/ and tablespace links
under pg_tblspc/. The latter restriction avoids possibly fsync'ing a
much larger part of the filesystem than intended, if the user has left
random symlinks hanging about in the data directory.
This commit takes care of that and also does some code beautification,
mainly moving the relevant code into fd.c, which seems a much better place
for it than xlog.c, and making sure that the conditional compilation for
the pre_sync_fname pass has something to do with whether pg_flush_data
works.
I also relocated the call site in xlog.c down a few lines; it seems a
bit silly to be doing this before ValidateXLOGDirectoryStructure().
The similar logic in initdb.c ought to be made to match this, but that
change is noncritical and will be dealt with separately.
Back-patch to all active branches, like the prior commit.
Abhijit Menon-Sen and Tom Lane
Typo in commit 7cbee7c0a. No practical effect since the buffer should
never actually be overrun, but various compilers and static analyzers will
whine about it.
Petr Jelinek
With commit de768844, a copy of the partial segment was archived with the
.partial suffix, but the original file was still left in pg_xlog, so it
didn't actually solve the problems with archiving the partial segment that
it was supposed to solve. With this patch, the partial segment is renamed
rather than copied, so we only archive it with the .partial suffix.
Also be more robust in detecting if the last segment is already being
archived. Previously I used XLogArchiveIsBusy() for that, but that's not
quite right. With archive_mode='always', there might be a .ready file for
it, and we don't want to rename it to .partial in that case.
The old segment is needed until we're fully committed to the new timeline,
i.e. until we've written the end-of-recovery WAL record and updated the
min recovery point and timeline in the control file. So move the renaming
later in the startup sequence, after all that's been done.
Previously even if recovery_target_action was set to pause and
the recovery target was reached, the recovery could never be paused.
Because the setting of pause was *always* overridden with that of
shutdown unexpectedly. This override is valid and intentional
if hot_standby is not enabled because there is no way to resume
the paused recovery in this case and the setting of pause is
completely useless. But not if hot_standby is enabled.
This patch changes the code so that the setting of pause is overridden
with that of shutdown only when hot_standby is not enabled.
Bug reported by Andres Freund
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.
Windows can't reliably restore symbolic links from a tar format, so
instead during backup start we create a tablespace_map file, which is
used by the restoring postgres to create the correct links in pg_tblspc.
The backup protocol also now has an option to request this file to be
included in the backup stream, and this is used by pg_basebackup when
operating in tar mode.
This is done on all platforms, not just Windows.
This means that pg_basebackup will not not work in tar mode against 9.4
and older servers, as this protocol option isn't implemented there.
Amit Kapila, reviewed by Dilip Kumar, with a little editing from me.
Previously, we would archive the possible-incomplete WAL segment with its
normal filename, but that causes trouble if the server owning that timeline
is still running, and tries to archive the same segment later. It's not nice
for the standby to trip up the master's archival like that. And it's pretty
confusing, anyway, to have an incomplete segment in the archive that's
indistinguishable from a normal, complete segment.
To avoid such confusion, add a .partial suffix to the file. Or to be more
precise, make a copy of the old segment under the .partial suffix, and
archive that instead of the original file. pg_receivexlog also uses the
.partial suffix for the same purpose, to tell apart incompletely streamed
files from complete ones.
There is no automatic mechanism to use the .partial files at recovery, so
they will go unused, unless the administrator manually copies to them to
the pg_xlog directory (and removes the .partial suffix). Recovery won't
normally need the WAL - when recovering to the new timeline, it will find
the same WAL on the first segment on the new timeline instead - but it
nevertheless feels better to archive the file with the .partial suffix, for
debugging purposes if nothing else.
Alvaro Herrera