Re: URGENT: Out of disk space pg_xlog

On Sat, 2006-12-23 at 13:13 -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> The bottom line is that we know of now cases where a long-running
> transaction would delay recycling of the WAL files, so there is
> certainly something not understood here.

We can see from all of this that a checkpoint definitely didn't occur.
Tom's causal chain was just one way that could have happened, there
could well be others.

I've noticed previously that a checkpoint can be starved out when trying
to acquire the CheckpointStartLock. I've witnessed a two minute delay
plus in obtaining the lock in the face of heavy transactions.

If wal_buffers is small enough, WAL write rate high enough and the
transaction rate high enough, a long queue can form for the
WALWriteLock, which ensures that the CheckpointStartLock would queue
indefinitely.

I've tried implementing a queueable shared lock for the
CheckpointStartLock. That helps the checkpoint, but it harms performance
of other transactions waiting to commit, so I let that idea go.

--
  Simon Riggs
  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com