summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/src/backend/postmaster/bgwriter.c
AgeCommit message (Collapse)Author
2013-01-01Update copyrights for 2013Bruce Momjian
Fully update git head, and update back branches in ./COPYRIGHT and legal.sgml files.
2012-12-20Don't set ThisTimeLineID in checkpointer & bgwriter during recovery.Heikki Linnakangas
We used to set it to the current recovery target timeline, but the recovery target timeline can change during recovery, leaving ThisTimeLineID at an old value. That seems worse than always leaving it at zero to begin with. AFAICS there was no good reason to set it in the first place. ThisTimeLineID is not needed in checkpointer or bgwriter process, until it's time to write the end-of-recovery checkpoint, and at that point ThisTimeLineID is updated anyway.
2012-12-13Make xlog_internal.h includable in frontend context.Heikki Linnakangas
This makes unnecessary the ugly hack used to #include postgres.h in pg_basebackup. Based on Alvaro Herrera's patch
2012-10-17Close un-owned SMgrRelations at transaction end.Tom Lane
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.
2012-08-28Split resowner.hAlvaro Herrera
This lets files that are mere users of ResourceOwner not automatically include the headers for stuff that is managed by the resowner mechanism.
2012-07-18Fix management of pendingOpsTable in auxiliary processes.Tom Lane
mdinit() was misusing IsBootstrapProcessingMode() to decide whether to create an fsync pending-operations table in the current process. This led to creating a table not only in the startup and checkpointer processes as intended, but also in the bgwriter process, not to mention other auxiliary processes such as walwriter and walreceiver. Creation of the table in the bgwriter is fatal, because it absorbs fsync requests that should have gone to the checkpointer; instead they just sit in bgwriter local memory and are never acted on. So writes performed by the bgwriter were not being fsync'd which could result in data loss after an OS crash. I think there is no live bug with respect to walwriter and walreceiver because those never perform any writes of shared buffers; but the potential is there for future breakage in those processes too. To fix, make AuxiliaryProcessMain() export the current process's AuxProcType as a global variable, and then make mdinit() test directly for the types of aux process that should have a pendingOpsTable. Having done that, we might as well also get rid of the random bool flags such as am_walreceiver that some of the aux processes had grown. (Note that we could not have fixed the bug by examining those variables in mdinit(), because it's called from BaseInit() which is run by AuxiliaryProcessMain() before entering any of the process-type-specific code.) Back-patch to 9.2, where the problem was introduced by the split-up of bgwriter and checkpointer processes. The bogus pendingOpsTable exists in walwriter and walreceiver processes in earlier branches, but absent any evidence that it causes actual problems there, I'll leave the older branches alone.
2012-06-10Run pgindent on 9.2 source tree in preparation for first 9.3Bruce Momjian
commit-fest.
2012-06-01After any checkpoint, close all smgr files handles in bgwriterSimon Riggs
2012-05-11Cosmetic adjustments for postmaster's handling of checkpointer.Tom Lane
Correct some comments, order some operations a bit more consistently. No functional changes.
2012-05-10Make WaitLatch's WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH result trustworthy; simplify callers.Tom Lane
Per a suggestion from Peter Geoghegan, make WaitLatch responsible for verifying that the WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH bit it returns is truthful (by testing PostmasterIsAlive). Then simplify its callers, who no longer need to do that for themselves. Remove weasel wording about falsely-set result bits from WaitLatch's API contract.
2012-05-10Improve tests for postmaster death in auxiliary processes.Tom Lane
In checkpointer and walwriter, avoid calling PostmasterIsAlive unless WaitLatch has reported WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH. This saves a kernel call per iteration of the process's outer loop, which is not all that much, but a cycle shaved is a cycle earned. I had already removed the unconditional PostmasterIsAlive calls in bgwriter and pgstat in previous patches, but forgot that WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH is supposed to be treated as untrustworthy (per comment in unix_latch.c); so adjust those two cases to match. There are a few other places where the same idea might be applied, but only after substantial code rearrangement, so I didn't bother.
2012-05-10Improve control logic for bgwriter hibernation mode.Tom Lane
Commit 6d90eaaa89a007e0d365f49d6436f35d2392cfeb added a hibernation mode to the bgwriter to reduce the server's idle-power consumption. However, its interaction with the detailed behavior of BgBufferSync's feedback control loop wasn't very well thought out. That control loop depends primarily on the rate of buffer allocation, not the rate of buffer dirtying, so the hibernation mode has to be designed to operate only when no new buffer allocations are happening. Also, the check for whether the system is effectively idle was not quite right and would fail to detect a constant low level of activity, thus allowing the bgwriter to go into hibernation mode in a way that would let the cycle time vary quite a bit, possibly further confusing the feedback loop. To fix, move the wakeup support from MarkBufferDirty and SetBufferCommitInfoNeedsSave into StrategyGetBuffer, and prevent the bgwriter from entering hibernation mode unless no buffer allocations have happened recently. In addition, fix the delaying logic to remove the problem of possibly not responding to signals promptly, which was basically caused by trying to use the process latch's is_set flag for multiple purposes. I can't prove it but I'm suspicious that that hack was responsible for the intermittent "postmaster does not shut down" failures we've been seeing in the buildfarm lately. In any case it did nothing to improve the readability or robustness of the code. In passing, express the hibernation sleep time as a multiplier on BgWriterDelay, not a constant. I'm not sure whether there's any value in exposing the longer sleep time as an independently configurable setting, but we can at least make it act like this for little extra code.
2012-01-26Make bgwriter sleep longer when it has no work to do, to save electricity.Heikki Linnakangas
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.
2012-01-01Update copyright notices for year 2012.Bruce Momjian
2011-11-01Comment changes to show bgwriter no longer performs checkpoints.Simon Riggs
2011-11-01Split work of bgwriter between 2 processes: bgwriter and checkpointer.Simon Riggs
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
2011-09-04Clean up the #include mess a little.Tom Lane
walsender.h should depend on xlog.h, not vice versa. (Actually, the inclusion was circular until a couple hours ago, which was even sillier; but Bruce broke it in the expedient rather than logically correct direction.) Because of that poor decision, plus blind application of pgrminclude, we had a situation where half the system was depending on xlog.h to include such unrelated stuff as array.h and guc.h. Clean up the header inclusion, and manually revert a lot of what pgrminclude had done so things build again. This episode reinforces my feeling that pgrminclude should not be run without adult supervision. Inclusion changes in header files in particular need to be reviewed with great care. More generally, it'd be good if we had a clearer notion of module layering to dictate which headers can sanely include which others ... but that's a big task for another day.
2011-09-01Remove unnecessary #include references, per pgrminclude script.Bruce Momjian
2011-07-08Introduce a pipe between postmaster and each backend, which can be used toHeikki Linnakangas
detect postmaster death. Postmaster keeps the write-end of the pipe open, so when it dies, children get EOF in the read-end. That can conveniently be waited for in select(), which allows eliminating some of the polling loops that check for postmaster death. This patch doesn't yet change all the loops to use the new mechanism, expect a follow-on patch to do that. This changes the interface to WaitLatch, so that it takes as argument a bitmask of events that it waits for. Possible events are latch set, timeout, postmaster death, and socket becoming readable or writeable. The pipe method behaves slightly differently from the kill() method previously used in PostmasterIsAlive() in the case that postmaster has died, but its parent has not yet read its exit code with waitpid(). The pipe returns EOF as soon as the process dies, but kill() continues to return true until waitpid() has been called (IOW while the process is a zombie). Because of that, change PostmasterIsAlive() to use the pipe too, otherwise WaitLatch() would return immediately with WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH, while PostmasterIsAlive() would claim it's still alive. That could easily lead to busy-waiting while postmaster is in zombie state. Peter Geoghegan with further changes by me, reviewed by Fujii Masao and Florian Pflug.
2011-06-29Unify spelling of "canceled", "canceling", "cancellation"Peter Eisentraut
We had previously (af26857a2775e7ceb0916155e931008c2116632f) established the U.S. spellings as standard.
2011-04-10pgindent run before PG 9.1 beta 1.Bruce Momjian
2011-03-19Move synchronous_standbys_defined updates from WAL writer to BG writer.Robert Haas
This is advantageous because the BG writer is alive until much later in the shutdown sequence than WAL writer; we want to make sure that it's possible to shut off synchronous replication during a smart shutdown, else it might not be possible to complete the shutdown at all. Per very reasonable gripes from Fujii Masao and Simon Riggs.
2011-01-29Try to avoid running with a full fsync request queue.Robert Haas
When we need to insert a new entry and the queue is full, compact the entire queue in the hopes of making room for the new entry. Doing this on every insertion might worsen contention on BgWriterCommLock, but when the queue it's full, it's far better than allowing the backend to perform its own fsync, per testing by Greg Smith as reported in http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-01/msg02665.php Original idea from Greg Smith. Patch by me. Review by Chris Browne and Greg Smith
2011-01-01Stamp copyrights for year 2011.Bruce Momjian
2010-11-15Add new buffers_backend_fsync field to pg_stat_bgwriter.Robert Haas
This new field counts the number of times that a backend which writes a buffer out to the OS must also fsync() it. This happens when the bgwriter fsync request queue is full, and is generally detrimental to performance, so it's good to know when it's happening. Along the way, log a new message at level DEBUG1 whenever we fail to hand off an fsync, so that the problem can also be seen in examination of log files (if the logging level is cranked up high enough). Greg Smith, with minor tweaks by me.
2010-09-20Remove cvs keywords from all files.Magnus Hagander
2010-08-13Include the backend ID in the relpath of temporary relations.Robert Haas
This allows us to reliably remove all leftover temporary relation files on cluster startup without reference to system catalogs or WAL; therefore, we no longer include temporary relations in XLOG_XACT_COMMIT and XLOG_XACT_ABORT WAL records. Since these changes require including a backend ID in each SharedInvalSmgrMsg, the size of the SharedInvalidationMessage.id field has been reduced from two bytes to one, and the maximum number of connections has been reduced from INT_MAX / 4 to 2^23-1. It would be possible to remove these restrictions by increasing the size of SharedInvalidationMessage by 4 bytes, but right now that doesn't seem like a good trade-off. Review by Jaime Casanova and Tom Lane.
2010-04-28Modify ShmemInitStruct and ShmemInitHash to throw errors internally,Tom Lane
rather than returning NULL for some-but-not-all failures as they used to. Remove now-redundant tests for NULL from call sites. We had to do something about this because many call sites were failing to check for NULL; and changing it like this seems a lot more useful and mistake-proof than adding checks to the call sites without them.
2010-02-05Document that archive_timeout will force new WAL files even if a singleBruce Momjian
checkpoint has happened, and recommend adjusting checkpoint_timeout to reduce the impact of this.
2010-01-15Introduce Streaming Replication.Heikki Linnakangas
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
2010-01-02Update copyright for the year 2010.Bruce Momjian
2009-12-16If there is no sigdelset(), define it as a macro.Peter Eisentraut
This removes some duplicate code that recreated the identical workaround when the newer signal API is missing.
2009-07-31Create a multiplexing structure for signals to Postgres child processes.Tom Lane
This patch gets us out from under the Unix limitation of two user-defined signal types. We already had done something similar for signals directed to the postmaster process; this adds multiplexing for signals directed to backends and auxiliary processes (so long as they're connected to shared memory). As proof of concept, replace the former usage of SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for backends with use of the multiplexing mechanism. There are still some hard-wired definitions of SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for other process types, but getting rid of those doesn't seem interesting at the moment. Fujii Masao
2009-06-26Cleanup and code review for the patch that made bgwriter active duringTom Lane
archive recovery. Invent a separate state variable and inquiry function for XLogInsertAllowed() to clarify some tests and make the management of writing the end-of-recovery checkpoint less klugy. Fix several places that were incorrectly testing InRecovery when they should be looking at RecoveryInProgress or XLogInsertAllowed (because they will now be executed in the bgwriter not startup process). Clarify handling of bad LSNs passed to XLogFlush during recovery. Use a spinlock for setting/testing SharedRecoveryInProgress. Improve quite a lot of comments. Heikki and Tom
2009-06-25Fix some serious bugs in archive recovery, now that bgwriter is activeHeikki Linnakangas
during it: When bgwriter is active, the startup process can't perform mdsync() correctly because it won't see the fsync requests accumulated in bgwriter's private pendingOpsTable. Therefore make bgwriter responsible for the end-of-recovery checkpoint as well, when it's active. When bgwriter is active (= archive recovery), the startup process must not accumulate fsync requests to its own pendingOpsTable, since bgwriter won't see them there when it performs restartpoints. Make startup process drop its pendingOpsTable when bgwriter is launched to avoid that. Update minimum recovery point one last time when leaving archive recovery. It won't be updated by the end-of-recovery checkpoint because XLogFlush() sees us as out of recovery already. This fixes bug #4879 reported by Fujii Masao.
2009-06-118.4 pgindent run, with new combined Linux/FreeBSD/MinGW typedef listBruce Momjian
provided by Andrew.
2009-06-04Improve the recently-added support for properly pluralized error messagesTom Lane
by extending the ereport() API to cater for pluralization directly. This is better than the original method of calling ngettext outside the elog.c code because (1) it avoids double translation, which wastes cycles and in the worst case could give a wrong result; and (2) it avoids having to use a different coding method in PL code than in the core backend. The client-side uses of ngettext are not touched since neither of these concerns is very pressing in the client environment. Per my proposal of yesterday.
2009-05-15Fix all the server-side SIGQUIT handlers (grumble ... why so many identicalTom Lane
copies?) to ensure they really don't run proc_exit/shmem_exit callbacks, as was intended. I broke this behavior recently by installing atexit callbacks without thinking about the one case where we truly don't want to run those callback functions. Noted in an example from Dave Page.
2009-03-26Gettext plural supportPeter Eisentraut
In the backend, I changed only a handful of exemplary or important-looking instances to make use of the plural support; there is probably more work there. For the rest of the source, this should cover all relevant cases.
2009-02-18Start background writer during archive recovery. Background writer now performsHeikki Linnakangas
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.
2009-01-01Update copyright for 2009.Bruce Momjian
2008-11-23Teach RequestCheckpoint() to wait and retry a few times if it can't signalTom Lane
the bgwriter immediately. This covers the case where the bgwriter is still starting up, as seen in a recent buildfarm failure. In future it might also assist with clean recovery after a bgwriter termination and restart --- right now the postmaster treats early bgwriter exit as a system crash, but that might not always be so.
2008-10-14Fix oversight in the relation forks patch: forgot to copy fork number toHeikki Linnakangas
fsync requests. This should fix the installcheck failure of the buildfarm member "kudu".
2008-09-30Rewrite the FSM. Instead of relying on a fixed-size shared memory segment, theHeikki Linnakangas
free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each relation (except for hash indexes; they don't use FSM). This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC options; remove any trace of them from the backend, initdb, and documentation. Rewrite contrib/pg_freespacemap to match the new FSM implementation. Also introduce a new variant of the get_raw_page(regclass, int4, int4) function in contrib/pageinspect that let's you to return pages from any relation fork, and a new fsm_page_contents() function to inspect the new FSM pages.
2008-08-11Introduce the concept of relation forks. An smgr relation can now consistHeikki Linnakangas
of multiple forks, and each fork can be created and grown separately. The bulk of this patch is about changing the smgr API to include an extra ForkNumber argument in every smgr function. Also, smgrscheduleunlink and smgrdounlink no longer implicitly call smgrclose, because other forks might still exist after unlinking one. The callers of those functions have been modified to call smgrclose instead. This patch in itself doesn't have any user-visible effect, but provides the infrastructure needed for upcoming patches. The additional forks envisioned are a rewritten FSM implementation that doesn't rely on a fixed-size shared memory block, and a visibility map to allow skipping portions of a table in VACUUM that have no dead tuples.
2008-05-12Restructure some header files a bit, in particular heapam.h, by removing someAlvaro Herrera
unnecessary #include lines in it. Also, move some tuple routine prototypes and macros to htup.h, which allows removal of heapam.h inclusion from some .c files. For this to work, a new header file access/sysattr.h needed to be created, initially containing attribute numbers of system columns, for pg_dump usage. While at it, make contrib ltree, intarray and hstore header files more consistent with our header style.
2008-02-17Replace time_t with pg_time_t (same values, but always int64) in on-diskTom Lane
data structures and backend internal APIs. This solves problems we've seen recently with inconsistent layout of pg_control between machines that have 32-bit time_t and those that have already migrated to 64-bit time_t. Also, we can get out from under the problem that Windows' Unix-API emulation is not consistent about the width of time_t. There are a few remaining places where local time_t variables are used to hold the current or recent result of time(NULL). I didn't bother changing these since they do not affect any cross-module APIs and surely all platforms will have 64-bit time_t before overflow becomes an actual risk. time_t should be avoided for anything visible to extension modules, however.
2008-01-01Update copyrights in source tree to 2008.Bruce Momjian
2007-11-15pgindent run for 8.3.Bruce Momjian
2007-11-14Fix incorrect calculation of elapsed_xlogs. Itagaki TakahiroTom Lane