Re: all_visible replay aborting due to uninitialized pages

On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Andres Freund <andres@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> Guessing around I looked and noticed the following problematic pattern:
> 1) A: wants to do an update, doesn't have enough freespace
> 2) A: extends the relation on the filesystem level (RelationGetBufferForTuple)
> 3) A: does PageInit (RelationGetBufferForTuple)
> 4) A: aborts, e.g. due to a serialization failure (heap_update)
>
> At this point the page is initialized in memory, but not wal logged. It
> isn't pinned or locked either.
>
> 5) B: vacuum finds that page and it's empty. So it marks it all
> visible. But since the page wasn't written out (we haven't even marked
> it dirty in 3.) the standby doesn't know that and reports the page as
> being uninitialized.
>
> ISTM the best backbranchable fix for this is to teach lazy_scan_heap to
> log an FPI for the heap page via visibilitymap_set in that rather
> limited case.
>
> Happy to provide a patch unless somebody has a better idea?

Good catch.  However, I would suggest using log_newpage() before
visibilitymap_set() rather than trying to stick extra logic into
visibilitymap_set().  I think that will be cleaner and simpler.

-- 
Robert Haas
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