Up to now RecordTransactionCommit() waited for WAL to be flushed (if
synchronous_commit != off) and to be synchronously replicated (if
enabled), even if a transaction did not have a xid assigned. The primary
reason for that is that sequence's nextval() did not assign a xid, but
are worthwhile to wait for on commit.
This can be problematic because sometimes read only transactions do
write WAL, e.g. HOT page prune records. That then could lead to read only
transactions having to wait during commit. Not something people expect
in a read only transaction.
This lead to such strange symptoms as backends being seemingly stuck
during connection establishment when all synchronous replicas are
down. Especially annoying when said stuck connection is the standby
trying to reconnect to allow syncrep again...
This behavior also is involved in a rather complicated <= 9.4 bug where
the transaction started by catchup interrupt processing waited for
syncrep using latches, but didn't get the wakeup because it was already
running inside the same overloaded signal handler. Fix the issue here
doesn't properly solve that issue, merely papers over the problems. In
9.5 catchup interrupts aren't processed out of signal handlers anymore.
To fix all this, make nextval() acquire a top level xid, and only wait for
transaction commit if a transaction both acquired a xid and emitted WAL
records. If only a xid has been assigned we don't uselessly want to
wait just because of writes to temporary/unlogged tables; if only WAL
has been written we don't want to wait just because of HOT prunes.
The xid assignment in nextval() is unlikely to cause overhead in
real-world workloads. For one it only happens SEQ_LOG_VALS/32 values
anyway, for another only usage of nextval() without using the result in
an insert or similar is affected.
Discussion: 20150223165359.GF30784@awork2.anarazel.de,
369698E947874884A77849D8FE3680C2@maumau,
5CF4ABBA67674088B3941894E22A0D25@maumau
Per complaint from maumau and Thom Brown
Backpatch all the way back; 9.0 doesn't have syncrep, but it seems
better to be consistent behavior across all maintained branches.
Andres Freund
5c8dabecdb