In situations where there are over 8MB of empty pages at the end of
a table, the truncation work for trailing empty pages takes longer
than deadlock_timeout, and there is frequent access to the table by
processes other than autovacuum, there was a problem with the
autovacuum worker process being canceled by the deadlock checking
code. The truncation work done by autovacuum up that point was
lost, and the attempt tried again by a later autovacuum worker. The
attempts could continue indefinitely without making progress,
consuming resources and blocking other processes for up to
deadlock_timeout each time.
This patch has the autovacuum worker checking whether it is
blocking any other thread at 20ms intervals. If such a condition
develops, the autovacuum worker will persist the work it has done
so far, release its lock on the table, and sleep in 50ms intervals
for up to 5 seconds, hoping to be able to re-acquire the lock and
try again. If it is unable to get the lock in that time, it moves
on and a worker will try to continue later from the point this one
left off.
While this patch doesn't change the rules about when and what to
truncate, it does cause the truncation to occur sooner, with less
blocking, and with the consumption of fewer resources when there is
contention for the table's lock.
The only user-visible change other than improved performance is
that the table size during truncation may change incrementally
instead of just once.
Backpatched to 9.0 from initial master commit at
b19e4250b4 -- before that the
differences are too large to be clearly safe.
Jan Wieck
This reverts commit c11130690d in favor of
actually fixing the problem: namely, that we should never have been
modifying the checkpoint record's nextXid at this point to begin with.
The nextXid should match the state as of the checkpoint's logical WAL
position (ie the redo point), not the state as of its physical position.
It's especially bogus to advance it in some wal_levels and not others.
In any case there is no need for the checkpoint record to carry the
same nextXid shown in the XLOG_RUNNING_XACTS record just emitted by
LogStandbySnapshot, as any replay operation will already have adopted
that value as current.
This fixes bug #7710 from Tarvi Pillessaar, and probably also explains bug
#6291 from Daniel Farina, in that if a checkpoint were in progress at the
instant of XID wraparound, the epoch bump would be lost as reported.
(And, of course, these days there's at least a 50-50 chance of a checkpoint
being in progress at any given instant.)
Diagnosed by me and independently by Andres Freund. Back-patch to all
branches supporting hot standby.
Previously we performed VirtualXactLockTableInsert
but didn't set MyProc->lxid for Startup process.
pg_locks now correctly shows "1/1" for vxid
of Startup process during Hot Standby.
At end of Hot Standby the Virtual Transaction
was not deleted, leading to problems after
promoting to normal running for some commands,
such as CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY.
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.
In the previous coding, new backend processes would attempt to create their
self-pipe during the OwnLatch call in InitProcess. However, pipe creation
could fail if the kernel is short of resources; and the system does not
recover gracefully from a FATAL error right there, since we have armed the
dead-man switch for this process and not yet set up the on_shmem_exit
callback that would disarm it. The postmaster then forces an unnecessary
database-wide crash and restart, as reported by Sean Chittenden.
There are various ways we could rearrange the code to fix this, but the
simplest and sanest seems to be to split out creation of the self-pipe into
a new function InitializeLatchSupport, which must be called from a place
where failure is allowed. For most processes that gets called in
InitProcess or InitAuxiliaryProcess, but processes that don't call either
but still use latches need their own calls.
Back-patch to 9.1, which has only a part of the latch logic that 9.2 and
HEAD have, but nonetheless includes this bug.
In all branches back to 8.3, this patch fixes a questionable assumption in
CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue that there are
no uninitialized pad bytes in the request queue structs. This would only
cause trouble if (a) there were such pad bytes, which could happen in 8.4
and up if the compiler makes enum ForkNumber narrower than 32 bits, but
otherwise would require not-currently-planned changes in the widths of
other typedefs; and (b) the kernel has not uniformly initialized the
contents of shared memory to zeroes. Still, it seems a tad risky, and we
can easily remove any risk by pre-zeroing the request array for ourselves.
In addition to that, we need to establish a coding rule that struct
RelFileNode can't contain any padding bytes, since such structs are copied
into the request array verbatim. (There are other places that are assuming
this anyway, it turns out.)
In 9.1 and up, the risk was a bit larger because we were also effectively
assuming that struct RelFileNodeBackend contained no pad bytes, and with
fields of different types in there, that would be much easier to break.
However, there is no good reason to ever transmit fsync or delete requests
for temp files to the bgwriter/checkpointer, so we can revert the request
structs to plain RelFileNode, getting rid of the padding risk and saving
some marginal number of bytes and cycles in fsync queue manipulation while
we are at it. The savings might be more than marginal during deletion of
a temp relation, because the old code transmitted an entirely useless but
nonetheless expensive-to-process ForgetRelationFsync request to the
background process, and also had the background process perform the file
deletion even though that can safely be done immediately.
In addition, make some cleanup of nearby comments and small improvements to
the code in CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue.
Commit 62c7bd31c8 had assorted problems, most
visibly that it broke PREPARE TRANSACTION in the presence of session-level
advisory locks (which should be ignored by PREPARE), as per a recent
complaint from Stephen Rees. More abstractly, the patch made the
LockMethodData.transactional flag not merely useless but outright
dangerous, because in point of fact that flag no longer tells you anything
at all about whether a lock is held transactionally. This fix therefore
removes that flag altogether. We now rely entirely on the convention
already in use in lock.c that transactional lock holds must be owned by
some ResourceOwner, while session holds are never so owned. Setting the
locallock struct's owner link to NULL thus denotes a session hold, and
there is no redundant marker for that.
PREPARE TRANSACTION now works again when there are session-level advisory
locks, and it is also able to transfer transactional advisory locks to the
prepared transaction, but for implementation reasons it throws an error if
we hold both types of lock on a single lockable object. Perhaps it will be
worth improving that someday.
Assorted other minor cleanup and documentation editing, as well.
Back-patch to 9.1, except that in the 9.1 branch I did not remove the
LockMethodData.transactional flag for fear of causing an ABI break for
any external code that might be examining those structs.
We log AccessExclusiveLocks for replay onto standby nodes,
but because of timing issues on ProcArray it is possible to
log a lock that is still held by a just committed transaction
that is very soon to be removed. To avoid any timing issue we
avoid applying locks made by transactions with InvalidXid.
Simon Riggs, bug report Tom Lane, diagnosis Pavan Deolasee
Historically we've used the SWPB instruction for TAS() on ARM, but this
is deprecated and not available on ARMv6 and later. Instead, make use
of a GCC builtin if available. We'll still fall back to SWPB if not,
so as not to break existing ports using older GCC versions.
Eventually we might want to try using __sync_lock_test_and_set() on some
other architectures too, but for now that seems to present only risk and
not reward.
Back-patch to all supported versions, since people might want to use any
of them on more recent ARM chips.
Martin Pitt
There was a timing window between when oldestActiveXid was derived
and when it should have been derived that only shows itself under
heavy load. Move code around to ensure correct timing of derivation.
No change to StartupSUBTRANS() code, which is where this failed.
Bug report by Chris Redekop
Fix a whole bunch of signal handlers that had been hacked to do things that
might change errno, without adding the necessary save/restore logic for
errno. Also make some minor fixes in unix_latch.c, and clean up bizarre
and unsafe scheme for disowning the process's latch. While at it, rename
the PGPROC latch field to procLatch for consistency with 9.2.
Issues noted while reviewing a patch by Peter Geoghegan.
Improve the documentation around weak-memory-ordering risks, and do a pass
of general editorialization on the comments in the latch code. Make the
Windows latch code more like the Unix latch code where feasible; in
particular provide the same Assert checks in both implementations.
Fix poorly-placed WaitLatch call in syncrep.c.
This patch resolves, for the moment, concerns around weak-memory-ordering
bugs in latch-related code: we have documented the restrictions and checked
that existing calls meet them. In 9.2 I hope that we will install suitable
memory barrier instructions in SetLatch/ResetLatch, so that their callers
don't need to be quite so careful.
This kluge was inserted in a spot apparently chosen at random: the lock
manager's state is not yet fully set up for the wait, and in particular
LockWaitCancel hasn't been armed by setting lockAwaited, so the ProcLock
will not get cleaned up if the ereport is thrown. This seems to not cause
any observable problem in trivial test cases, because LockReleaseAll will
silently clean up the debris; but I was able to cause failures with tests
involving subtransactions.
Fixes breakage induced by commit c85c941470.
Back-patch to all affected branches.
It was initialized in the wrong place and to the wrong value. With bad
luck this could result in incorrect query-cancellation failures in hot
standby sessions, should a HS backend be holding pin on buffer number 1
while trying to acquire a lock.
transactions might not match the order the work done in those transactions
become visible to others. The logic in SSI, however, assumed that it does.
Fix that by having two sequence numbers for each serializable transaction,
one taken before a transaction becomes visible to others, and one after it.
This is easier than trying to make the the transition totally atomic, which
would require holding ProcArrayLock and SerializableXactHashLock at the same
time. By using prepareSeqNo instead of commitSeqNo in a few places where
commit sequence numbers are compared, we can make those comparisons err on
the safe side when we don't know for sure which committed first.
Per analysis by Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, but this approach to fix it
is different from the original patch.
As Tom Lane pointed out, "const Relation foo" doesn't guarantee that you
can't modify the data the "foo" pointer points to. It just means that you
can't change the pointer to point to something else within the function,
which is not very useful.
MARKED_FOR_DEATH flags into one. We still need the ROLLED_BACK flag to
mark transactions that are in the process of being rolled back. To be
precise, ROLLED_BACK now means that a transaction has already been
discounted from the count of transactions with the oldest xmin, but not
yet removed from the list of active transactions.
Dan Ports
the marked-for-death flag. It was only set for a fleeting moment while a
transaction was being cleaned up at rollback. All the places that checked
for the rolled-back flag should also check the marked-for-death flag, as
both flags mean that the transaction will roll back. I also renamed the
marked-for-death into "doomed", which is a lot shorter name.
snapshots, like in REINDEX, are basically non-transactional operations. The
DDL operation itself might participate in SSI, but there's separate
functions for that.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, with some changes by me.
Even if a flag is modified only by the backend owning the transaction, it's
not safe to modify it without a lock. Another backend might be setting or
clearing a different flag in the flags field concurrently, and that
operation might be lost because setting or clearing a bit in a word is not
atomic.
Make did-write flag a simple backend-private boolean variable, because it
was only set or tested in the owning backend (except when committing a
prepared transaction, but it's not worthwhile to optimize for the case of a
read-only prepared transaction). This also eliminates the need to add
locking where that flag is set.
Also, set the did-write flag when doing DDL operations like DROP TABLE or
TRUNCATE -- that was missed earlier.
"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.)
Truncating or dropping a table is treated like deletion of all tuples, and
check for conflicts accordingly. If a table is clustered or rewritten by
ALTER TABLE, all predicate locks on the heap are promoted to relation-level
locks, because the tuple or page ids of any existing tuples will change and
won't be valid after rewriting the table. Arguably ALTER TABLE should be
treated like a mass-UPDATE of every row, but if you e.g change the datatype
of a column, you could also argue that it's just a change to the physical
layout, not a logical change. Reindexing promotes all locks on the index to
relation-level lock on the heap.
Kevin Grittner, with a lot of cosmetic changes by me.
On further analysis, it turns out that it is not needed to duplicate predicate
locks to the new row version at update, the lock on the version that the
transaction saw as visible is enough. However, there was a different bug in
the code that checks for dangerous structures when a new rw-conflict happens.
Fix that bug, and remove all the row-version chaining related code.
Kevin Grittner & Dan Ports, with some comment editorialization by me.
If a smart shutdown occurs just as a child is starting up, and the
child subsequently becomes a walsender, there is a race condition:
the postmaster might count the exstant backends, determine that there
is one normal backend, and wait for it to die off. Had the walsender
transition already occurred before the postmaster counted, it would
have proceeded with the shutdown.
To fix this, have each child that transforms into a walsender kick
the postmaster just after doing so, so that the state machine is
certain to advance.
Fujii Masao
than replication_timeout (a new GUC) milliseconds. The TCP timeout is often
too long, you want the master to notice a dead connection much sooner.
People complained about that in 9.0 too, but with synchronous replication
it's even more important to notice dead connections promptly.
Fujii Masao and Heikki Linnakangas
than doing it aggressively whenever the tail-XID pointer is advanced, because
this way we don't need to do it while holding SerializableXactHashLock.
This also fixes bug #5915 spotted by YAMAMOTO Takashi, and removes an
obsolete comment spotted by Kevin Grittner.
If a standby is broadcasting reply messages and we have named
one or more standbys in synchronous_standby_names then allow
users who set synchronous_replication to wait for commit, which
then provides strict data integrity guarantees. Design avoids
sending and receiving transaction state information so minimises
bookkeeping overheads. We synchronize with the highest priority
standby that is connected and ready to synchronize. Other standbys
can be defined to takeover in case of standby failure.
This version has very strict behaviour; more relaxed options
may be added at a later date.
Simon Riggs and Fujii Masao, with reviews by Yeb Havinga, Jaime
Casanova, Heikki Linnakangas and Robert Haas, plus the assistance
of many other design reviewers.
Change the way UPDATEs are handled. Instead of maintaining a chain of
tuple-level locks in shared memory, copy any existing locks on the old
tuple to the new tuple at UPDATE. Any existing page-level lock needs to
be duplicated too, as a lock on the new tuple. That was neglected
previously.
Store xmin on tuple-level predicate locks, to distinguish a lock on an old
already-recycled tuple from a new tuple at the same physical location.
Failure to distinguish them caused loops in the tuple-lock chains, as
reported by YAMAMOTO Takashi. Although we don't use the chain representation
of UPDATEs anymore, it seems like a good idea to store the xmin to avoid
some false positives if no other reason.
CheckSingleTargetForConflictsIn now correctly handles the case where a lock
that's being held is not reflected in the local lock table. That happens
if another backend acquires a lock on our behalf due to an UPDATE or a page
split.
PredicateLockPageCombine now retains locks for the page that is being
removed, rather than removing them. This prevents a potentially dangerous
false-positive inconsistency where the local lock table believes that a lock
is held, but it is actually not.
Dan Ports and Kevin Grittner
They share the same locking namespace with the existing session-level
advisory locks, but they are automatically released at the end of the
current transaction and cannot be released explicitly via unlock
functions.
Marko Tiikkaja, reviewed by me.
Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.
To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.
A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.
Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.
We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
backend, as far as the postmaster shutdown logic is concerned. That means,
fast shutdown will wait for WAL sender processes to exit before signaling
bgwriter to finish. This avoids race conditions between a base backup stopping
or starting, and bgwriter writing the shutdown checkpoint WAL record. We don't
want e.g the end-of-backup WAL record to be written after the shutdown
checkpoint.
The contents of an unlogged table are WAL-logged; thus, they are not
available on standby servers and are truncated whenever the database
system enters recovery. Indexes on unlogged tables are also unlogged.
Unlogged GiST indexes are not currently supported.
First, avoid scanning the whole ProcArray once we know there
are at least commit_siblings active; second, skip the check
altogether if commit_siblings = 0.
Greg Smith
an old transaction running in the master, and a lot of transactions have
started and finished since, and a WAL-record is written in the gap between
the creating the running-xacts snapshot and WAL-logging it, recovery will fail
with "too many KnownAssignedXids" error. This bug was reported by
Joachim Wieland on Nov 19th.
In the same scenario, when fewer transactions have started so that all the
xids fit in KnownAssignedXids despite the first bug, a more serious bug
arises. We incorrectly initialize the clog code with the oldest still running
transaction, and when we see the WAL record belonging to a transaction with
an XID larger than one that committed already before the checkpoint we're
recovering from, we zero the clog page containing the already committed
transaction, leading to data loss.
In hindsight, trying to track xids in the known-assigned-xids array before
seeing the running-xacts record was too complicated. To fix that, hold
XidGenLock while the running-xacts snapshot is taken and WAL-logged. That
ensures that no transaction can begin or end in that gap, so that in recvoery
we know that the snapshot contains all transactions running at that point in
WAL.
removing an infrequently occurring race condition in Hot Standby.
An xid must be assigned before a lock appears in shared memory,
rather than immediately after, else GetRunningTransactionLocks()
may see InvalidTransactionId, causing assertion failures during
lock processing on standby.
Bug report and diagnosis by Fujii Masao, fix by me.
Kevin Grittner