Re: [HACKERS] [PATCH] Transaction traceability - txid_status(bigint)

On 23 December 2016 at 18:00, Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:

> I'll have to follow up with a patch soon, as it's Toddler o'Clock.

Here we go.

This patch advances oldestXid, under XidGenLock, _before_ truncating clog.

txid_status() holds XidGenLock from when it tests oldestXid until it's
done looking up clog, thus eliminating the race.

CLOG_TRUNCATE records now contain the oldestXid, so they can advance
oldestXid on a standby, or when we've truncated clog since the most
recent checkpoint on the master during recovery. It's advanced under
XidGenLock during redo to protect against this race on standby.

As outlined in my prior mail I think this is the right approach. I
don't like taking XidGenLock twice, but we don't advance datfrozenxid
much so it's not a big concern. While a separate ClogTruncationLock
could be added like in my earlier patch, oldestXid is currently under
XidGenLock and I'd rather not change that.

The biggest change here is that oldestXid is advanced separately to
the vac limits in the rest of ShmemVariableCache. As far as I can tell
we don't prevent two manual VACUUMs on different DBs from trying to
concurrently run vac_truncate_clog, so this has to be safe against two
invocations racing each other. Rather than try to lock out such
concurrency, the patch ensures that oldestXid can never go backwards.
It doesn't really matter if the vac limits go backwards, it's no worse
than what can already happen in the current code.

We cannot advance the vacuum limits before we truncate the clog away,
in case someone tries to access a very new xid (if we're near
wraparound)

I'm pretty sure that commit timestamps suffer from the same flaw as
Robert identified upthread with clog. This patch fixes the clog race,
but not the similar one in commit timestamps. Unlike the clog race
with txid_status(), the commit timestamps one is already potentially
user-visible since we allow arbitrary xids to be looked up for commit
timestamps. I'll address that separately.

-- 
 Craig Ringer                   http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
 PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services

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