On Wed, Sep 23, 2026 at 9:23 AM Antonin Houska <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> shihao zhong <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> > > or whether the relfilenode should be re-checked after the snapshot is 
> > > built
> >
> > Holding the toast lock from the start deadlocks. A session that asks for
> > AccessExclusiveLock gets an XID before it waits, and the decoding worker
> > waits for all XIDs while it sets up.
>
> The same (supposedly low) deadlock risk already exists for the main table, see
> this comment in rebuild_relation():
>
>     /*
>      * Start the worker that decodes data changes applied while we're
>      * copying the table contents.
>      *
>      * Note that the worker has to wait for all transactions with XID
>      * already assigned to finish. If some of those transactions is
>      * waiting for a lock conflicting with ShareUpdateExclusiveLock on our
>      * table (e.g.  it runs CREATE INDEX), we can end up in a deadlock.
>      * Not sure this risk is worth unlocking/locking the table (and its
>      * clustering index) and checking again if it's still eligible for
>      * REPACK CONCURRENTLY.
>      */
>     start_repack_decoding_worker(tableOid);
>
> I'm not sure if locking the TOAST relation earlier would make the situation
> worse.

Agreed.

So I think the simplest fix would be to acquire a lock on the TOAST
table before starting the repack worker. It would make the case in
question fail with a deadlock, instead of silently losing updates.

The proposed patch also fixes the problem, but I'm concerned that it
repeatedly starts and stops the repack worker without any limit. I
think we could error out if we detect a concurrent rewrite, so that
users can re-run REPACK CONCURRENTLY. This check could also be done on
the repack worker side: after getting the relfilelocator of the TOAST
table and initializing the logical decoding, the repack worker
rechecks the relfilelocator. If they don't match, it raises an error.

Regards,

-- 
Masahiko Sawada
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com


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