Re: walwriter interacts quite badly with synchronous_commit=off
On 2023-11-27 17:55:34 +0200, Heikki Linnakangas wrote: > On 25/10/2023 21:59, Andres Freund wrote: > > > See attached. It's the same logic as in your patch, just formulatd more > > > clearly IMHO. > > Yep, makes sense! > > Pushed this. Thanks for the investigation! Thanks!
Re: walwriter interacts quite badly with synchronous_commit=off
On 25/10/2023 21:59, Andres Freund wrote: See attached. It's the same logic as in your patch, just formulatd more clearly IMHO. Yep, makes sense! Pushed this. Thanks for the investigation! -- Heikki Linnakangas Neon (https://neon.tech)
Re: walwriter interacts quite badly with synchronous_commit=off
On 25/10/2023 21:59, Andres Freund wrote: On 2023-10-25 12:17:03 +0300, Heikki Linnakangas wrote: On 25/10/2023 02:09, Andres Freund wrote: Because of the inherent delay between the checks of XLogCtl->WalWriterSleeping and Latch->is_set, we also sometimes end up with multiple processes signalling walwriter, which can be bad, because it increases the likelihood that some of the signals may be received when we are already holding WALWriteLock, delaying its release... That can only happen when walwriter has just come out of "hibernation", ie. when the system has been idle for a while. So probably not a big deal in practice. Maybe I am missing something here - why can this only happen when hibernating? Even outside of that two backends can decide that that they need to wake up walwriter? Ah sure, multiple backends can decide to wake up walwriter at the same time. I thought you meant that the window for that was somehow wider when XLogCtl->WalWriterSleeping. We could prevent that, by updating state when requesting walwriter to be woken up. But with the changes we're discussing below, that should be rare. One small easy thing we could do to reduce the redundant wakeups: only wake up walwriter if asyncXactLSN points to different page than prevAsyncXactLSN. -- Heikki Linnakangas Neon (https://neon.tech)
Re: walwriter interacts quite badly with synchronous_commit=off
Hi,
On 2023-10-25 12:17:03 +0300, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> On 25/10/2023 02:09, Andres Freund wrote:
> > Because of the inherent delay between the checks of
> > XLogCtl->WalWriterSleeping
> > and Latch->is_set, we also sometimes end up with multiple processes
> > signalling
> > walwriter, which can be bad, because it increases the likelihood that some
> > of
> > the signals may be received when we are already holding WALWriteLock,
> > delaying
> > its release...
>
> That can only happen when walwriter has just come out of "hibernation", ie.
> when the system has been idle for a while. So probably not a big deal in
> practice.
Maybe I am missing something here - why can this only happen when hibernating?
Even outside of that two backends can decide that that they need to wake up
walwriter?
We could prevent that, by updating state when requesting walwriter to be woken
up. But with the changes we're discussing below, that should be rare.
> > I think the most important optimization we need is to have
> > XLogSetAsyncXactLSN() only wake up if there is a certain amount of unflushed
> > WAL. Unless walsender is hibernating, walsender will wake up on its own
> > after
> > wal_writer_delay. I think we can just reuse WalWriterFlushAfter for this.
> >
> > E.g. a condition like
> > if (WriteRqstPtr <= LogwrtResult.Write + WalWriterFlushAfter *
> > XLOG_BLCKSZ)
> > return;
> > drastically cuts down on the amount of wakeups, without - I think - loosing
> > guarantees around synchronous_commit=off.
>
> In the patch, you actually did:
>
> > + if (WriteRqstPtr <= LogwrtResult.Flush + WalWriterFlushAfter *
> > XLOG_BLCKSZ)
> > + return;
>
> It means that you never wake up the walwriter to merely *write* the WAL. You
> only wake it up if it's going to also fsync() it. I think that's correct and
> appropriate, but it took me a while to reach that conclusion:
Yea, after writing the email I got worried that just looking at Write would
perhaps lead to not flushing data soon enough...
> It might be beneficial to wake up the walwriter just to perform a write(),
> to offload that work from the backend. And walwriter will actually also
> perform an fsync() after finishing the current segment, so it would make
> sense to also wake it up when 'asyncXactLSN' crosses a segment boundary.
> However, if those extra wakeups make sense, they would also make sense when
> there are no asynchronous commits involved. Therefore those extra wakeups
> should be done elsewhere, perhaps somewhere around AdvanceXLInsertBuffer().
> The condition you have in the patch is appropriate for
> XLogSetAsyncXactLSN().
Yea. I agree we should wake up walsender in other situations too...
> Another reason to write the WAL aggressively, even if you don't flush it,
> would be to reduce the number of lost transactions on a segfault. But we
> don't give any guarantees on that, and even with the current aggressive
> logic, we only write when a page is full so you're anyway going to lose the
> last partial page.
Wal writer does end up writing the trailing partially filled page during the
next wal_writer_delay cycle.
> It also took me a while to convince myself that this calculation matches the
> calculation that XLogBackgroundFlush() uses to determine whether it needs to
> flush or not. XLogBackgroundFlush() first divides the request and result
> with XLOG_BLCKSZ and then compares the number of blocks, whereas here you
> perform the calculation in bytes. I think the result is the same, but to
> make it more clear, let's do it the same way in both places.
>
> See attached. It's the same logic as in your patch, just formulatd more
> clearly IMHO.
Yep, makes sense!
> > Because of the frequent wakeups, we do something else that's not smart: We
> > write out 8k blocks individually, many times a second. Often thousands of
> > 8k pwrites a second.
>
> Even with this patch, when I bumped up wal_writer_delay to 2 so that the wal
> writer gets woken up by the async commits rather than the timeout, the write
> pattern is a bit silly:
>
> $ strace -p 1099926 # walwriter
> strace: Process 1099926 attached
> epoll_wait(10, [{events=EPOLLIN, data={u32=3704011232,
> u64=94261056289248}}], 1, 1991) = 1
> read(3,
> "\27\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0<\312\20\0\350\3\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"...,
> 1024) = 128
> pwrite64(5,
> "\24\321\5\0\1\0\0\0\0\300\0\373\5\0\0\0+\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\n\0\0n\276\242\305"...,
> 1007616, 49152) = 1007616
> fdatasync(5)= 0
> pwrite64(5, "\24\321\5\0\1\0\0\0\0
> \20\373\5\0\0\0003\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\320\37\20\373\5\0\0\0"..., 16384, 1056768)
> = 16384
> epoll_wait(10, [{events=EPOLLIN, data={u32=3704011232,
> u64=94261056289248}}], 1, 2000) = 1
> read(3,
> "\27\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0<\312\20\0\350\3\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"...,
> 1024) = 128
> pwrite64(5,
> "\24\321\5\0\1\0\0\0\0`\20\373\5\0\0\0+\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\n\0\0\5~\23\261"...,
> 1040384, 1073152)
Re: walwriter interacts quite badly with synchronous_commit=off
On 25/10/2023 02:09, Andres Freund wrote:
Because of the inherent delay between the checks of XLogCtl->WalWriterSleeping
and Latch->is_set, we also sometimes end up with multiple processes signalling
walwriter, which can be bad, because it increases the likelihood that some of
the signals may be received when we are already holding WALWriteLock, delaying
its release...
That can only happen when walwriter has just come out of "hibernation",
ie. when the system has been idle for a while. So probably not a big
deal in practice.
I think the most important optimization we need is to have
XLogSetAsyncXactLSN() only wake up if there is a certain amount of unflushed
WAL. Unless walsender is hibernating, walsender will wake up on its own after
wal_writer_delay. I think we can just reuse WalWriterFlushAfter for this.
E.g. a condition like
if (WriteRqstPtr <= LogwrtResult.Write + WalWriterFlushAfter *
XLOG_BLCKSZ)
return;
drastically cuts down on the amount of wakeups, without - I think - loosing
guarantees around synchronous_commit=off.
In the patch, you actually did:
+ if (WriteRqstPtr <= LogwrtResult.Flush + WalWriterFlushAfter *
XLOG_BLCKSZ)
+ return;
It means that you never wake up the walwriter to merely *write* the WAL.
You only wake it up if it's going to also fsync() it. I think that's
correct and appropriate, but it took me a while to reach that conclusion:
It might be beneficial to wake up the walwriter just to perform a
write(), to offload that work from the backend. And walwriter will
actually also perform an fsync() after finishing the current segment, so
it would make sense to also wake it up when 'asyncXactLSN' crosses a
segment boundary. However, if those extra wakeups make sense, they would
also make sense when there are no asynchronous commits involved.
Therefore those extra wakeups should be done elsewhere, perhaps
somewhere around AdvanceXLInsertBuffer(). The condition you have in the
patch is appropriate for XLogSetAsyncXactLSN().
Another reason to write the WAL aggressively, even if you don't flush
it, would be to reduce the number of lost transactions on a segfault.
But we don't give any guarantees on that, and even with the current
aggressive logic, we only write when a page is full so you're anyway
going to lose the last partial page.
It also took me a while to convince myself that this calculation matches
the calculation that XLogBackgroundFlush() uses to determine whether it
needs to flush or not. XLogBackgroundFlush() first divides the request
and result with XLOG_BLCKSZ and then compares the number of blocks,
whereas here you perform the calculation in bytes. I think the result is
the same, but to make it more clear, let's do it the same way in both
places.
See attached. It's the same logic as in your patch, just formulatd more
clearly IMHO.
Because of the frequent wakeups, we do something else that's not smart: We
write out 8k blocks individually, many times a second. Often thousands of
8k pwrites a second.
Even with this patch, when I bumped up wal_writer_delay to 2 so that the
wal writer gets woken up by the async commits rather than the timeout,
the write pattern is a bit silly:
$ strace -p 1099926 # walwriter
strace: Process 1099926 attached
epoll_wait(10, [{events=EPOLLIN, data={u32=3704011232,
u64=94261056289248}}], 1, 1991) = 1
read(3,
"\27\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0<\312\20\0\350\3\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"...,
1024) = 128
pwrite64(5,
"\24\321\5\0\1\0\0\0\0\300\0\373\5\0\0\0+\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\n\0\0n\276\242\305"...,
1007616, 49152) = 1007616
fdatasync(5)= 0
pwrite64(5, "\24\321\5\0\1\0\0\0\0
\20\373\5\0\0\0003\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\320\37\20\373\5\0\0\0"..., 16384,
1056768) = 16384
epoll_wait(10, [{events=EPOLLIN, data={u32=3704011232,
u64=94261056289248}}], 1, 2000) = 1
read(3,
"\27\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0<\312\20\0\350\3\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"...,
1024) = 128
pwrite64(5,
"\24\321\5\0\1\0\0\0\0`\20\373\5\0\0\0+\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\n\0\0\5~\23\261"...,
1040384, 1073152) = 1040384
fdatasync(5)= 0
pwrite64(5, "\24\321\4\0\1\0\0\0\0@
\373\5\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0;\0\0\0\264'\246\3"..., 16384, 2113536) = 16384
epoll_wait(10, [{events=EPOLLIN, data={u32=3704011232,
u64=94261056289248}}], 1, 2000) = 1
read(3,
"\27\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0<\312\20\0\350\3\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"...,
1024) = 128
pwrite64(5, "\24\321\5\0\1\0\0\0\0\200
\373\5\0\0\0003\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\320\177 \373\5\0\0\0"..., 1040384,
2129920) = 1040384
fdatasync(5)= 0
In each cycle, the wal writer writes a full 1 MB chunk
(wal_writer_flush_after = '1MB'), flushes it, and then perform a smaller
write before going to sleep.
Those smaller writes seem a bit silly. But I think it's fine.
More throughput for less CPU, seems neat :)
Indeed, impressive speedup from such a small patch!
I'm not
walwriter interacts quite badly with synchronous_commit=off
Hi, I recently mentioned to Heikki that I was seeing latch related wakeups being frequent enough to prevent walwriter from doing a whole lot of work. He asked me to write that set of concerns up, which seems quite fair... Here's a profile of walwriter while the following pgbench run was ongoing: c=1;psql -Xq -c 'drop table if exists testtable_logged; CREATE TABLE testtable_logged(v int not null default 0);' && PGOPTIONS='-c synchronous_commit=off' pgbench -n -c$c -j$c -Mprepared -T150 -f <(echo 'INSERT INTO testtable_logged DEFAULT VALUES;') -P1 Looking at top, walwriter is around 15-20% busy with this workload. Unfortunately a profile quickly shows that little of that work is useful: perf record --call-graph dwarf -m16M -p $(pgrep -f 'walwriter') sleep 3 - 94.42% 0.00% postgres postgres [.] AuxiliaryProcessMain AuxiliaryProcessMain - WalWriterMain + 78.26% WaitLatch + 14.01% XLogBackgroundFlush + 0.51% pgstat_report_wal 0.29% ResetLatch 0.13% pgstat_flush_io + 0.02% asm_sysvec_apic_timer_interrupt 0.01% HandleWalWriterInterrupts (inlined) Confirmed by the distribution of what syscalls are made: perf trace -m128M --summary -p $(pgrep -f 'walwriter') sleep 5 syscallcalls errors total min avg max stddev (msec)(msec)(msec)(msec) (%) --- -- - - - -- epoll_wait216610 0 3744.984 0.000 0.017 0.113 0.03% read 216602 0 333.905 0.001 0.002 0.029 0.03% fdatasync 27 094.703 1.939 3.50811.279 8.83% pwrite642998 015.646 0.004 0.005 0.027 0.45% openat 2 0 0.019 0.006 0.010 0.013 34.84% close 2 0 0.004 0.002 0.002 0.003 25.76% We're doing far more latch related work than actual work. The walwriter many many times wakes up without having to do anything. And if you increase the number of clients to e.g. c=8, it gets worse in some ways: perf trace: epoll_wait291512 0 2364.067 0.001 0.008 0.693 0.10% read 290938 0 479.837 0.001 0.002 0.020 0.05% fdatasync146 0 410.043 2.508 2.809 7.006 1.90% futex 56384 43982 183.896 0.001 0.003 2.791 1.65% pwrite64 17058 0 105.625 0.004 0.006 4.015 4.61% clock_nanosleep1 0 1.063 1.063 1.063 1.063 0.00% openat 9 0 0.072 0.006 0.008 0.014 14.35% close 9 0 0.018 0.002 0.002 0.003 5.55% Note that we 5x more lock waits (the futex calls) than writes! I think the problem is mainly that XLogSetAsyncXactLSN() wakes up walwriter whenever it is sleeping, regardless of whether the modified asyncXactLSN will lead to a write. We even wake up walwriter when we haven't changed asyncXactLSN, because our LSN is older than some other backends! So often we'll just wake up walwriter, which finds no work, immediately goes to sleep, just to be woken again. Because of the inherent delay between the checks of XLogCtl->WalWriterSleeping and Latch->is_set, we also sometimes end up with multiple processes signalling walwriter, which can be bad, because it increases the likelihood that some of the signals may be received when we are already holding WALWriteLock, delaying its release... Because of the frequent wakeups, we do something else that's not smart: We write out 8k blocks individually, many times a second. Often thousands of 8k pwrites a second. We also acquire WALWriteLock and call WaitXLogInsertionsToFinish(), even if could already know we're not going to flush! Not cheap, when you do it this many times a second. There is an absolutely basic optimization, helping a it at higher client counts: Don't wake if the new asyncXactLSN is <= the old one. But it doesn't help that much. I think the most important optimization we need is to have XLogSetAsyncXactLSN() only wake up if there is a certain amount of unflushed WAL. Unless walsender is hibernating, walsender will wake up on its own after wal_writer_delay. I think we can just reuse WalWriterFlushAfter for this. E.g. a condition like if (WriteRqstPtr <= LogwrtResult.Write + WalWriterFlushAfter * XLOG_BLCKSZ) return; drastically cuts down on the amount of wakeups, without - I think - loosing guarantees around synchronous_commit=off. 1 client: before: tps = 42926.288765 (without initial connection time) syscallcalls errors total min avg max stddev
