When a backend needs to flush the WAL, and someone else is already flushing
the WAL, wait until it releases the WALInsertLock and check if we still need
to do the flush or if the other backend already did the work for us, before
acquiring WALInsertLock. This helps group commit, because when the WAL flush
finishes, all the backends that were waiting for it can be woken up in one
go, and the can all concurrently observe that they're done, rather than
waking them up one by one in a cascading fashion.
This is based on a new LWLock function, LWLockWaitUntilFree(), which has
peculiar semantics. If the lock is immediately free, it grabs the lock and
returns true. If it's not free, it waits until it is released, but then
returns false without grabbing the lock. This is used in XLogFlush(), so
that when the lock is acquired, the backend flushes the WAL, but if it's
not, the backend first checks the current flush location before retrying.
Original patch and benchmarking by Peter Geoghegan and Simon Riggs, although
this patch as committed ended up being very different from that.
To make it wake up promptly when activity starts again, backends nudge it
by setting a latch in MarkBufferDirty(). The latch is kept set while
bgwriter is active, so there is very little overhead from that when the
system is busy. It is only armed before going into longer sleep.
Peter Geoghegan, with some changes by me.
This speeds up snapshot-taking and reduces ProcArrayLock contention.
Also, the PGPROC (and PGXACT) structures used by two-phase commit are
now allocated as part of the main array, rather than in a separate
array, and we keep ProcArray sorted in pointer order. These changes
are intended to minimize the number of cache lines that must be pulled
in to take a snapshot, and testing shows a substantial increase in
performance on both read and write workloads at high concurrencies.
Pavan Deolasee, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
bgwriter is now a much less important process, responsible for page
cleaning duties only. checkpointer is now responsible for checkpoints
and so has a key role in shutdown. Later patches will correct doc
references to the now old idea that bgwriter performs checkpoints.
Has beneficial effect on performance at high write rates, but mainly
refactoring to more easily allow changes for power reduction by
simplifying previously tortuous code around required to allow page
cleaning and checkpointing to time slice in the same process.
Patch by me, Review by Dickson Guedes
As per my recent proposal, this refactors things so that these typedefs and
macros are available in a header that can be included in frontend-ish code.
I also changed various headers that were undesirably including
utils/timestamp.h to include datatype/timestamp.h instead. Unsurprisingly,
this showed that half the system was getting utils/timestamp.h by way of
xlog.h.
No actual code changes here, just header refactoring.
storage/proc.h should not include replication/syncrep.h, especially not
when the latter includes storage/proc.h; but in any case this was a pretty
poor thing from a modular layering standpoint.
In pursuit of this (and with the expectation that WaitLatch will be needed
in more places), convert the latch field that was already added to PGPROC
for sync rep into a generic latch that is activated for all PGPROC-owning
processes, and change many of the standard backend signal handlers to set
that latch when a signal happens. This will allow WaitLatch callers to be
wakened properly by these signals.
In passing, 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. Much of
this has to be back-patched into 9.1.
Peter Geoghegan, with additional work by Tom
Instead of entering them on transaction startup, we materialize them
only when someone wants to wait, which will occur only during CREATE
INDEX CONCURRENTLY. In Hot Standby mode, the startup process must also
be able to probe for conflicting VXID locks, but the lock need never be
fully materialized, because the startup process does not use the normal
lock wait mechanism. Since most VXID locks never need to touch the
lock manager partition locks, this can significantly reduce blocking
contention on read-heavy workloads.
Patch by me. Review by Jeff Davis.
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.
When an AccessShareLock, RowShareLock, or RowExclusiveLock is requested
on an unshared database relation, and we can verify that no conflicting
locks can possibly be present, record the lock in a per-backend queue,
stored within the PGPROC, rather than in the primary lock table. This
eliminates a great deal of contention on the lock manager LWLocks.
This patch also refactors the interface between GetLockStatusData() and
pg_lock_status() to be a bit more abstract, so that we don't rely so
heavily on the lock manager's internal representation details. The new
fast path lock structures don't have a LOCK or PROCLOCK structure to
return, so we mustn't depend on that for purposes of listing outstanding
locks.
Review by Jeff Davis.
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.
During Hot Standby we need to check for buffer pin deadlocks when the
Startup process begins to wait, in case it never wakes up again. We
previously made the deadlock check immediately on the basis it was
cheap, though clearer thinking and prima facie evidence shows that
was too simple. Refactor existing code to make it easy to add in
deferral of deadlock check until deadlock_timeout allowing a good
reduction in deadlock checks since far few buffer pins are held for
that duration. It's worth doing anyway, though major goal is to
prevent further reports of context switching with high numbers of
users on occasional tests.
process. If startup waits on a buffer pin we send a request to all
backends to cancel themselves if they are holding the buffer pin
required and they are also waiting on a lock. If not, startup waits
until max_standby_delay before cancelling any backend waiting for
the requested buffer pin.
woken by alarm we send SIGUSR1 to all backends requesting that they
check to see if they are blocking Startup process. If so, they throw
ERROR/FATAL as for other conflict resolutions. Deadlock stop gap
removed. max_standby_delay = -1 option removed to prevent deadlock.
Conflict reason is passed through directly to the backend, so we can
take decisions about the effect of the conflict based upon the local
state. No specific changes, as yet, though this prepares for later work.
CancelVirtualTransaction() sends signals while holding ProcArrayLock.
Introduce errdetail_abort() to give message detail explaining that the
abort was caused by conflict processing. Remove CONFLICT_MODE states
in favour of using PROCSIG_RECOVERY_CONFLICT states directly, for clarity.
This includes two new kinds of postmaster processes, walsenders and
walreceiver. Walreceiver is responsible for connecting to the primary server
and streaming WAL to disk, while walsender runs in the primary server and
streams WAL from disk to the client.
Documentation still needs work, but the basics are there. We will probably
pull the replication section to a new chapter later on, as well as the
sections describing file-based replication. But let's do that as a separate
patch, so that it's easier to see what has been added/changed. This patch
also adds a new section to the chapter about FE/BE protocol, documenting the
protocol used by walsender/walreceivxer.
Bump catalog version because of two new functions,
pg_last_xlog_receive_location() and pg_last_xlog_replay_location(), for
monitoring the progress of replication.
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me
Enabled by recovery_connections = on (default) and forcing archive recovery using a recovery.conf. Recovery processing now emulates the original transactions as they are replayed, providing full locking and MVCC behaviour for read only queries. Recovery must enter consistent state before connections are allowed, so there is a delay, typically short, before connections succeed. Replay of recovering transactions can conflict and in some cases deadlock with queries during recovery; these result in query cancellation after max_standby_delay seconds have expired. Infrastructure changes have minor effects on normal running, though introduce four new types of WAL record.
New test mode "make standbycheck" allows regression tests of static command behaviour on a standby server while in recovery. Typical and extreme dynamic behaviours have been checked via code inspection and manual testing. Few port specific behaviours have been utilised, though primary testing has been on Linux only so far.
This commit is the basic patch. Additional changes will follow in this release to enhance some aspects of behaviour, notably improved handling of conflicts, deadlock detection and query cancellation. Changes to VACUUM FULL are also required.
Simon Riggs, with significant and lengthy review by Heikki Linnakangas, including streamlined redesign of snapshot creation and two-phase commit.
Important contributions from Florian Pflug, Mark Kirkwood, Merlin Moncure, Greg Stark, Gianni Ciolli, Gabriele Bartolini, Hannu Krosing, Robert Haas, Tatsuo Ishii, Hiroyuki Yamada plus support and feedback from many other community members.
via the "flat files" facility. This requires making it enough like a backend
to be able to run transactions; it's no longer an "auxiliary process" but
more like the autovacuum worker processes. Also, its signal handling has
to be brought into line with backends/workers. In particular, since it
now has to handle procsignal.c processing, the special autovac-launcher-only
signal conditions are moved to SIGUSR2.
Alvaro, with some cleanup from Tom
To make this work in the base case, pg_database now has a nailed-in-cache
relation descriptor that is initialized using hardwired knowledge in
relcache.c. This means pg_database is added to the set of relations that
need to have a Schema_pg_xxx macro maintained in pg_attribute.h. When this
path is taken, we'll have to do a seqscan of pg_database to find the row
we need.
In the normal case, we are able to do an indexscan to find the database's row
by name. This is made possible by storing a global relcache init file that
describes only the shared catalogs and their indexes (and therefore is usable
by all backends in any database). A new backend loads this cache file,
finds its database OID after an indexscan on pg_database, and then loads
the local relcache init file for that database.
This change should effectively eliminate number of databases as a factor
in backend startup time, even with large numbers of databases. However,
the real reason for doing it is as a first step towards getting rid of
the flat files altogether. There are still several other sub-projects
to be tackled before that can happen.
replication patch needs a signal, but we've already used SIGUSR1 and
SIGUSR2 in normal backends. This patch allows reusing SIGUSR1 for that,
and for other purposes too if the need arises.
allowed different processes to have different addresses for the shmem segment
in quite a long time, but there were still a few places left that used the
old coding convention. Clean them up to reduce confusion and improve the
compiler's ability to detect pointer type mismatches.
Kris Jurka
whether to execute an immediate interrupt, rather than testing whether
LockWaitCancel() cancelled a lock wait. The old way misclassified the case
where we were blocked in ProcWaitForSignal(), and arguably would misclassify
any other future additions of new ImmediateInterruptOK states too. This
allows reverting the old kluge that gave LockWaitCancel() a return value,
since no callers care anymore. Improve comments in the various
implementations of PGSemaphoreLock() to explain that on some platforms, the
assumption that semop() exits after a signal is wrong, and so we must ensure
that the signal handler itself throws elog if we want cancel or die interrupts
to be effective. Per testing related to bug #3883, though this patch doesn't
solve those problems fully.
Perhaps this change should be back-patched, but since pre-8.3 branches aren't
really relying on autovacuum to respond to SIGINT, it doesn't seem critical
for them.
having several of them. Add two more flags: whether the process is
executing an ANALYZE, and whether a vacuum is for Xid wraparound (which
is obviously only set by autovacuum).
Sneakily move the worker's recently-acquired PostAuthDelay to a more useful
place.
rows will normally never obtain an XID at all. We already did things this way
for subtransactions, but this patch extends the concept to top-level
transactions. In applications where there are lots of short read-only
transactions, this should improve performance noticeably; not so much from
removal of the actual XID-assignments, as from reduction of overhead that's
driven by the rate of XID consumption. We add a concept of a "virtual
transaction ID" so that active transactions can be uniquely identified even
if they don't have a regular XID. This is a much lighter-weight concept:
uniqueness of VXIDs is only guaranteed over the short term, and no on-disk
record is made about them.
Florian Pflug, with some editorialization by Tom.
processes to be running simultaneously. Also, now autovacuum processes do not
count towards the max_connections limit; they are counted separately from
regular processes, and are limited by the new GUC variable
autovacuum_max_workers.
The launcher now has intelligence to launch workers on each database every
autovacuum_naptime seconds, limited only on the max amount of worker slots
available.
Also, the global worker I/O utilization is limited by the vacuum cost-based
delay feature. Workers are "balanced" so that the total I/O consumption does
not exceed the established limit. This part of the patch was contributed by
ITAGAKI Takahiro.
Per discussion.
are in their commit critical sections via flags in the ProcArray. Checkpoint
can watch the ProcArray to determine when it's safe to proceed. This is
a considerably better solution to the original problem of race conditions
between checkpoint and transaction commit: it speeds up commit, since there's
one less lock to fool with, and it prevents the problem of checkpoint being
delayed indefinitely when there's a constant flow of commits. Heikki, with
some kibitzing from Tom.
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.
accessing it, like DROP DATABASE. This allows the regression tests to pass
with autovacuum enabled, which open the gates for finally enabling autovacuum
by default.
