Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-08 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 7 July 2011 19:15, Robert Haas robertmh...@gmail.com wrote:
 I'm not concerned about the possibility of spurious extra cycles of
 auxiliary process event loops - should I be?

 A tight loop would be bad, but an occasional spurious wake-up seems harmless.

We should also assert !PostmasterIsAlive() from within the latch code
after waking due to apparent Postmaster death. The reason that I don't
want to follow Florian's suggestion to check it in production is that
I don't know what to do if the postmaster turns out to be alive. Why
is it more reasonable to try again than to just return? If the
spurious wake-up thing was a problem that we could actually reproduce,
then maybe I'd have an opinion on it. As it stands, our entire basis
for thinking this may be a problem is the sentence There may be other
circumstances in which a file descriptor is spuriously reported as
ready. That seems rather flimsy.

Anyone that still has any misgivings about this will probably feel
better once the assertion is never reported to fail on any of the
diverse systems that PostgreSQL will be tested on in advance of the
9.2 release.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-08 Thread Florian Pflug
On Jul8, 2011, at 11:57 , Peter Geoghegan wrote:
 On 7 July 2011 19:15, Robert Haas robertmh...@gmail.com wrote:
 I'm not concerned about the possibility of spurious extra cycles of
 auxiliary process event loops - should I be?
 
 A tight loop would be bad, but an occasional spurious wake-up seems harmless.
 
 We should also assert !PostmasterIsAlive() from within the latch code
 after waking due to apparent Postmaster death. The reason that I don't
 want to follow Florian's suggestion to check it in production is that
 I don't know what to do if the postmaster turns out to be alive. Why
 is it more reasonable to try again than to just return?

I'd say return, but don't indicate postmaster death in the return value
if PostmasterIsAlive() returns true. Or don't call PostmasterIsAlive() in
WaitLatch(), and return indicating postmaster death whenever select()
says so, and put the burden of re-checking on the callers.

I agree that retrying isn't all that reasonable.

 If the
 spurious wake-up thing was a problem that we could actually reproduce,
 then maybe I'd have an opinion on it. As it stands, our entire basis
 for thinking this may be a problem is the sentence There may be other
 circumstances in which a file descriptor is spuriously reported as
 ready. That seems rather flimsy.

Flimsy or not, it pretty clearly warns us not to depend on there being
no spurious wake ups. Whether or not we know how to actually produce
there is IMHO largely irrelevant - what matters is whether the guarantees
given by select() match the expectations of our code. Which, according to
the cited passage, they currently don't.

 Anyone that still has any misgivings about this will probably feel
 better once the assertion is never reported to fail on any of the
 diverse systems that PostgreSQL will be tested on in advance of the
 9.2 release.

I'm not so convinced that WaitLatch() will get exercised much on
assert-enabled builds. But I might very well be wrong there...

best regards,
Florian Pflug


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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-08 Thread Heikki Linnakangas

On 08.07.2011 13:58, Florian Pflug wrote:

On Jul8, 2011, at 11:57 , Peter Geoghegan wrote:

On 7 July 2011 19:15, Robert Haasrobertmh...@gmail.com  wrote:

I'm not concerned about the possibility of spurious extra cycles of
auxiliary process event loops - should I be?


A tight loop would be bad, but an occasional spurious wake-up seems harmless.


We should also assert !PostmasterIsAlive() from within the latch code
after waking due to apparent Postmaster death. The reason that I don't
want to follow Florian's suggestion to check it in production is that
I don't know what to do if the postmaster turns out to be alive. Why
is it more reasonable to try again than to just return?


I'd say return, but don't indicate postmaster death in the return value
if PostmasterIsAlive() returns true. Or don't call PostmasterIsAlive() in
WaitLatch(), and return indicating postmaster death whenever select()
says so, and put the burden of re-checking on the callers.


I put the burden on the callers. Removing the return value from 
WaitLatch() altogether just makes life unnecessarily difficult for 
callers that could safely use that information, even if you sometimes 
get spurious wakeups. In particular, the coding in pgarch.c is nicer if 
you can simply check the return code for WL_TIMEOUT, rather than call 
time(NULL) to figure out if the timeout was reached.


Attached is a new version of this patch. PostmasterIsAlive() now uses 
read() on the pipe instead of kill().


--
  Heikki Linnakangas
  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com
*** a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
--- b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
***
*** 9938,9944  HandleStartupProcInterrupts(void)
  	 * Emergency bailout if postmaster has died.  This is to avoid the
  	 * necessity for manual cleanup of all postmaster children.
  	 */
! 	if (IsUnderPostmaster  !PostmasterIsAlive(true))
  		exit(1);
  }
  
--- 9938,9944 
  	 * Emergency bailout if postmaster has died.  This is to avoid the
  	 * necessity for manual cleanup of all postmaster children.
  	 */
! 	if (IsUnderPostmaster  !PostmasterIsAlive())
  		exit(1);
  }
  
***
*** 10165,10171  retry:
  	/*
  	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
  	 */
! 	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, 500L);
  	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
  }
  else
--- 10165,10171 
  	/*
  	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
  	 */
! 	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, WL_LATCH_SET | WL_TIMEOUT, 500L);
  	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
  }
  else
*** a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
--- b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
***
*** 93,98 
--- 93,99 
  #endif
  
  #include miscadmin.h
+ #include postmaster/postmaster.h
  #include storage/latch.h
  #include storage/shmem.h
  
***
*** 176,209  DisownLatch(volatile Latch *latch)
  }
  
  /*
!  * Wait for given latch to be set or until timeout is exceeded.
!  * If the latch is already set, the function returns immediately.
   *
!  * The 'timeout' is given in microseconds, and -1 means wait forever.
!  * On some platforms, signals cause the timeout to be restarted, so beware
!  * that the function can sleep for several times longer than the specified
!  * timeout.
   *
   * The latch must be owned by the current process, ie. it must be a
   * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
   * associated with the current process by calling OwnLatch.
   *
!  * Returns 'true' if the latch was set, or 'false' if timeout was reached.
   */
! bool
! WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, long timeout)
  {
! 	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, PGINVALID_SOCKET, false, false, timeout)  0;
  }
  
  /*
!  * Like WaitLatch, but will also return when there's data available in
!  * 'sock' for reading or writing. Returns 0 if timeout was reached,
!  * 1 if the latch was set, 2 if the socket became readable or writable.
   */
  int
! WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
!   bool forWrite, long timeout)
  {
  	struct timeval tv,
  			   *tvp = NULL;
--- 177,220 
  }
  
  /*
!  * Wait for a given latch to be set, postmaster death, or until timeout is
!  * exceeded. 'wakeEvents' is a bitmask that specifies which of those events
!  * to wait for. If the latch is already set (and WL_LATCH_SET is given), the
!  * function returns immediately.
   *
!  * The 'timeout' is given in microseconds. It must be = 0 if WL_TIMEOUT
!  * event is given, otherwise it is ignored. On some platforms, signals cause
!  * the timeout to be restarted, so beware that the function can sleep for
!  * several times longer than the specified timeout.
   *
   * The latch must be owned by the current process, ie. it must be a
   * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
   * associated with the current process by calling OwnLatch.
   *
!  * Returns 

Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-08 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 8 July 2011 13:40, Heikki Linnakangas
heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com wrote:
 I put the burden on the callers. Removing the return value from WaitLatch()
 altogether just makes life unnecessarily difficult for callers that could
 safely use that information, even if you sometimes get spurious wakeups. In
 particular, the coding in pgarch.c is nicer if you can simply check the
 return code for WL_TIMEOUT, rather than call time(NULL) to figure out if the
 timeout was reached.

+1

 Attached is a new version of this patch. PostmasterIsAlive() now uses read()
 on the pipe instead of kill().

The consensus so far is that in practice spurious wake-ups in
auxiliary process event loops won't a problem. You may want to wait
for others to weigh in here.

This comment in pgarch.c is slightly malformed - note the quote:

/*
 * Sleep until a signal is received, or until a poll is forced by
 ' PGARCH_AUTOWAKE_INTERVAL having passed since last_copy_time, or
 * until postmaster dies.
 */

Other than that, I suggest you commit v8 as-is.

Incidentally, I like that this removes the amDirectChild argument to
PostmasterIsAlive() - an added benefit.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-08 Thread Heikki Linnakangas

On 08.07.2011 16:11, Peter Geoghegan wrote:

Incidentally, I like that this removes the amDirectChild argument to
PostmasterIsAlive() - an added benefit.


amDirectChild==false has actually been dead code for years. But the new 
pipe method would work for a non-direct child too as long as the pipe fd 
is inherited by the non-direct child, should we need that in the future 
again.


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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-08 Thread Florian Pflug
On Jul8, 2011, at 14:40 , Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
 On 08.07.2011 13:58, Florian Pflug wrote:
 On Jul8, 2011, at 11:57 , Peter Geoghegan wrote:
 On 7 July 2011 19:15, Robert Haasrobertmh...@gmail.com  wrote:
 I'm not concerned about the possibility of spurious extra cycles of
 auxiliary process event loops - should I be?
 
 A tight loop would be bad, but an occasional spurious wake-up seems 
 harmless.
 
 We should also assert !PostmasterIsAlive() from within the latch code
 after waking due to apparent Postmaster death. The reason that I don't
 want to follow Florian's suggestion to check it in production is that
 I don't know what to do if the postmaster turns out to be alive. Why
 is it more reasonable to try again than to just return?
 
 I'd say return, but don't indicate postmaster death in the return value
 if PostmasterIsAlive() returns true. Or don't call PostmasterIsAlive() in
 WaitLatch(), and return indicating postmaster death whenever select()
 says so, and put the burden of re-checking on the callers.
 
 I put the burden on the callers. Removing the return value from WaitLatch() 
 altogether just makes life unnecessarily difficult for callers that could 
 safely use that information, even if you sometimes get spurious wakeups. In 
 particular, the coding in pgarch.c is nicer if you can simply check the 
 return code for WL_TIMEOUT, rather than call time(NULL) to figure out if the 
 timeout was reached.
 
 Attached is a new version of this patch. PostmasterIsAlive() now uses read() 
 on the pipe instead of kill().

I did notice a few (very minor) loose ends...

SyncRepWaitForLSN() says
  /*
   * Wait on latch for up to 60 seconds. This allows us to check for
   * postmaster death regularly while waiting. Note that timeout here
   * does not necessarily release from loop.
   */
  WaitLatch(MyProc-waitLatch, 6000L);

I guess that 60-second timeout is unnecessary now that we'll wake up
on postmaster death anyway.

Also, none of the callers of WaitLatch() seems to actually inspect
the WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH bit of the result. We might want to make
their !PostmasterIsAlive() check conditional on the WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH
bit being set. At least in the case of SyncRepWaitForLSN(), it seems
that avoiding the extra read() syscall might be beneficial.

Maybe these cleanups would better be done in a separate patch, though...

best regards,
Florian Pflug


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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-08 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 8 July 2011 15:58, Florian Pflug f...@phlo.org wrote:
 SyncRepWaitForLSN() says
  /*
   * Wait on latch for up to 60 seconds. This allows us to check for
   * postmaster death regularly while waiting. Note that timeout here
   * does not necessarily release from loop.
   */
  WaitLatch(MyProc-waitLatch, 6000L);

 I guess that 60-second timeout is unnecessary now that we'll wake up
 on postmaster death anyway.

We won't wake up on Postmaster death here, because we haven't asked to
- not yet, anyway. We're just using the new interface here for that
one function call in v8.

 Also, none of the callers of WaitLatch() seems to actually inspect
 the WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH bit of the result. We might want to make
 their !PostmasterIsAlive() check conditional on the WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH
 bit being set. At least in the case of SyncRepWaitForLSN(), it seems
 that avoiding the extra read() syscall might be beneficial.

I don't think so. Postmaster death is an anomaly, so why bother with
any sort of optimisation for that case? Also, that's exactly the sort
of thing that we're trying to caution callers against doing with this
comment:

That should be rare in practice, but the caller should not use the
return value for anything critical, re-checking the situation with
PostmasterIsAlive() or read() on a socket if necessary.

You might say that the only reason we even bother reporting postmaster
death in the returned bitfield is because there is an expectation that
it will report it, given that we use the same masks on wakeEvents to
inform the function what events we'll actually be waiting on for the
call.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-08 Thread Florian Pflug
On Jul8, 2011, at 17:56 , Peter Geoghegan wrote:
 On 8 July 2011 15:58, Florian Pflug f...@phlo.org wrote:
 SyncRepWaitForLSN() says
  /*
   * Wait on latch for up to 60 seconds. This allows us to check for
   * postmaster death regularly while waiting. Note that timeout here
   * does not necessarily release from loop.
   */
  WaitLatch(MyProc-waitLatch, 6000L);
 
 I guess that 60-second timeout is unnecessary now that we'll wake up
 on postmaster death anyway.
 
 We won't wake up on Postmaster death here, because we haven't asked to
 - not yet, anyway. We're just using the new interface here for that
 one function call in v8.

Oh, Right. I still think it'd might be worthwhile to convert it, but
but not in this patch.

 Also, none of the callers of WaitLatch() seems to actually inspect
 the WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH bit of the result. We might want to make
 their !PostmasterIsAlive() check conditional on the WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH
 bit being set. At least in the case of SyncRepWaitForLSN(), it seems
 that avoiding the extra read() syscall might be beneficial.
 
 I don't think so. Postmaster death is an anomaly, so why bother with
 any sort of optimisation for that case? Also, that's exactly the sort
 of thing that we're trying to caution callers against doing with this
 comment:
 
 That should be rare in practice, but the caller should not use the
 return value for anything critical, re-checking the situation with
 PostmasterIsAlive() or read() on a socket if necessary.

Uh, I phrased that badly. What I meant was doing

  if ((result  WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH)  (!PostmasterIsAlive())

instead of

  if (!PostmasterIsAlive)

It seems that currently SyncRepWaitForLSN() will execute
PostmasterIsAlive() after every wake up. But actually it only needs
to do that if WaitLatch() sets WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH. Usually we wouldn't
care, but in the case of SyncRepWaitForLSN() I figures that we might.
It's in the code path of COMMIT (in the case of synchronous replication)
after all...

We'd not optimize the case of a dead postmaster, but the case of
an live one. Which I do hope is the common case ;-)

 You might say that the only reason we even bother reporting postmaster
 death in the returned bitfield is because there is an expectation that
 it will report it, given that we use the same masks on wakeEvents to
 inform the function what events we'll actually be waiting on for the
 call.

I kinda guessed that to be the reason after reading the latest patch ;-)

best regards,
Florian Pflug




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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-08 Thread Heikki Linnakangas

On 08.07.2011 18:56, Peter Geoghegan wrote:

On 8 July 2011 15:58, Florian Pflugf...@phlo.org  wrote:

Also, none of the callers of WaitLatch() seems to actually inspect
the WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH bit of the result. We might want to make
their !PostmasterIsAlive() check conditional on the WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH
bit being set. At least in the case of SyncRepWaitForLSN(), it seems
that avoiding the extra read() syscall might be beneficial.


I don't think so. Postmaster death is an anomaly, so why bother with
any sort of optimisation for that case?


We currently call PostmasterIsAlive() on every iteration of the loop, 
and what Florian is saying is that it would be more efficient to only 
call PostmasterIsAlive() if WaitLatch() reports that the postmaster has 
died. That's an optimization that would help the case where postmaster 
has not died. However, I don't think it makes any difference in practice 
because the loop usually only iterates once, and there's break 
statements to exit the loop as soon as one of the other exit conditions 
are satisfied.


I just committed the v8 of the patch, BTW, after fixing the comment typo 
you pointed out. Thanks!


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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-08 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 8 July 2011 17:10, Heikki Linnakangas
heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com wrote:
 I just committed the v8 of the patch, BTW, after fixing the comment typo you
 pointed out. Thanks!

Great, thanks.

Also, thank you Florian and Fujii.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-07 Thread Peter Geoghegan
I now think that we shouldn't change the return value format from the
most recent revisions of the patch (i.e. returning a bitfield). We
should leave it as-is, while documenting that it's possible, although
extremely unlikely, for it to incorrectly report Postmaster death, and
that clients therefore have a onus to check that themselves using
PostmasterIsAlive(). We already provide fairly weak guarantees as to
the validity of that return value (Note that if multiple wake-up
conditions are true, there is no guarantee that we return all of them
in one call, but we will return at least one). Making them a bit
weaker still seems acceptable.

In addition, we'd change the implementation of PostmasterIsAlive() to
/just/ perform the read() test as already described.

I'm not concerned about the possibility of spurious extra cycles of
auxiliary process event loops - should I be?

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-07 Thread Robert Haas
On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 1:41 PM, Peter Geoghegan pe...@2ndquadrant.com wrote:
 I now think that we shouldn't change the return value format from the
 most recent revisions of the patch (i.e. returning a bitfield). We
 should leave it as-is, while documenting that it's possible, although
 extremely unlikely, for it to incorrectly report Postmaster death, and
 that clients therefore have a onus to check that themselves using
 PostmasterIsAlive(). We already provide fairly weak guarantees as to
 the validity of that return value (Note that if multiple wake-up
 conditions are true, there is no guarantee that we return all of them
 in one call, but we will return at least one). Making them a bit
 weaker still seems acceptable.

I agree - that seems like a good way to handle it.

 In addition, we'd change the implementation of PostmasterIsAlive() to
 /just/ perform the read() test as already described.

 I'm not concerned about the possibility of spurious extra cycles of
 auxiliary process event loops - should I be?

A tight loop would be bad, but an occasional spurious wake-up seems harmless.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-05 Thread Heikki Linnakangas

On 05.07.2011 00:42, Florian Pflug wrote:

On Jul4, 2011, at 23:11 , Peter Geoghegan wrote:

On 4 July 2011 17:36, Florian Pflugf...@phlo.org  wrote:

Btw, with the death-watch / life-sign / whatever infrastructure in place,
shouldn't PostmasterIsAlive() be using that instead of getppid() / kill(0)?


Hmm, maybe. That seems like a separate issue though, that can be
addressed with another patch. It does have the considerable
disadvantage of making Heikki's proposed assertion failure useless. Is
the implementation of PostmasterIsAlive() really a problem at the
moment?


I'm not sure that there is currently a guarantee that PostmasterIsAlive
will returns false immediately after select() indicates postmaster
death. If e.g. the postmaster's parent is still running (which happens
for example if you launch postgres via daemontools), the re-parenting of
backends to init might not happen until the postmaster zombie has been
vanquished by its parent's call of waitpid(). It's not entirely
inconceivable for getppid() to then return the (dead) postmaster's pid
until that waitpid() call has occurred.


Good point, and testing shows that that is exactly what happens at least 
on Linux (see attached test program). So, as the code stands, the 
children will go into a busy loop until the grandparent calls waitpid(). 
That's not good.


In that light, I agree we should replace kill() in PostmasterIsAlive() 
with read() on the pipe. It would react faster than the kill()-based 
test, which seems like a good thing. Or perhaps do both, and return 
false if either test says the postmaster is dead.


--
  Heikki Linnakangas
  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com
#include stdio.h
#include unistd.h

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
	pid_t parentpid,
		childpid;
	int pipefds[2];

	if ((parentpid = fork()) == 0)
	{
		parentpid = getpid();
		pipe(pipefds);

		if ((childpid = fork()) == 0)
		{
			char c;
			int rc;

			close(pipefds[1]);

			/* Wait for pipe to close */
			printf (read() returned %d\n, read(pipefds[0], c, 1));
			while (kill(parentpid, 0) == 0)
			{
printf(kill() says the parent is still alive\n);
sleep(1);
			}
			printf(kill() confirms that the parent is dead\n);
		}
		else
		{
			sleep(3);
			printf(parent exits now\n);
		}
	}
	else
	{
		printf(grandparent is sleeping\n);
		sleep(6);
		printf(grandparent exits now\n);
	}
}

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-05 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 5 July 2011 07:49, Heikki Linnakangas
heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com wrote:
 Good point, and testing shows that that is exactly what happens at least on
 Linux (see attached test program). So, as the code stands, the children will
 go into a busy loop until the grandparent calls waitpid(). That's not good.

 In that light, I agree we should replace kill() in PostmasterIsAlive() with
 read() on the pipe. It would react faster than the kill()-based test, which
 seems like a good thing. Or perhaps do both, and return false if either test
 says the postmaster is dead.

Hmm. Why assume that the opposite problem doesn't exist? What if the
kill-based test is faster than the read() on the pipe on some platform
or under some confluence of events?

I suggest that we agree on a standard for determining whether or not
the postmaster is dead and stick to it - that's already the case on
Windows. Since that standard cannot be the kill() based test, because
that would make a postmaster death aware latch implementation
impossible, it has to be the read() test proposed by Florian.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-04 Thread Heikki Linnakangas
Ok, here's a new patch, addressing the issues Fujii raised, and with a 
bunch of stylistic changes of my own. Also, I committed a patch to 
remove silent_mode, so the fork_process() changes are now gone. I'm 
going to sleep over this and review once again tomorrow, and commit if 
it still looks good to me and no-one else reports new issues.


There's two small issues left:

I don't like the names POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH and POSTMASTER_FD_OWN. At a 
quick glance, it's not at all clear which is which. I couldn't come up 
with better names, so for now I just added some comments to clarify 
that. I would find WRITE/READ more clear, but to make sense of that you 
need to how the pipe is used. Any suggestions or opinions on that?


The BUGS section of Linux man page for select(2) says:


   Under Linux, select() may report a socket file descriptor as ready for
   reading,  while nevertheless a subsequent read blocks.  This could for
   example happen when data has arrived but  upon  examination  has  wrong
   checksum and is discarded.  There may be other circumstances in which a
   file descriptor is spuriously reported as ready.  Thus it may be  safer
   to use O_NONBLOCK on sockets that should not block.


So in theory, on Linux you might WaitLatch might sometimes incorrectly 
return WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH. None of the callers check for 
WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH return code, they call PostmasterIsAlive() before 
assuming the postmaster has died, so that won't affect correctness at 
the moment. I doubt that scenario can even happen in our case, select() 
on a pipe that is never written to. But maybe we should add add an 
assertion to WaitLatch to assert that if select() reports that the 
postmaster pipe has been closed, PostmasterIsAlive() also returns false.


--
  Heikki Linnakangas
  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com
*** a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
--- b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
***
*** 10165,10171  retry:
  	/*
  	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
  	 */
! 	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, 500L);
  	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
  }
  else
--- 10165,10171 
  	/*
  	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
  	 */
! 	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, WL_LATCH_SET | WL_TIMEOUT, 500L);
  	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
  }
  else
*** a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
--- b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
***
*** 93,98 
--- 93,99 
  #endif
  
  #include miscadmin.h
+ #include postmaster/postmaster.h
  #include storage/latch.h
  #include storage/shmem.h
  
***
*** 179,209  DisownLatch(volatile Latch *latch)
   * Wait for given latch to be set or until timeout is exceeded.
   * If the latch is already set, the function returns immediately.
   *
!  * The 'timeout' is given in microseconds, and -1 means wait forever.
!  * On some platforms, signals cause the timeout to be restarted, so beware
!  * that the function can sleep for several times longer than the specified
!  * timeout.
   *
   * The latch must be owned by the current process, ie. it must be a
   * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
   * associated with the current process by calling OwnLatch.
   *
!  * Returns 'true' if the latch was set, or 'false' if timeout was reached.
   */
! bool
! WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, long timeout)
  {
! 	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, PGINVALID_SOCKET, false, false, timeout)  0;
  }
  
  /*
!  * Like WaitLatch, but will also return when there's data available in
!  * 'sock' for reading or writing. Returns 0 if timeout was reached,
!  * 1 if the latch was set, 2 if the socket became readable or writable.
   */
  int
! WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
!   bool forWrite, long timeout)
  {
  	struct timeval tv,
  			   *tvp = NULL;
--- 180,211 
   * Wait for given latch to be set or until timeout is exceeded.
   * If the latch is already set, the function returns immediately.
   *
!  * The 'timeout' is given in microseconds. It must be = 0 if WL_TIMEOUT
!  * event is given, otherwise it is ignored. On some platforms, signals cause
!  * the timeout to be restarted, so beware that the function can sleep for
!  * several times longer than the specified timeout.
   *
   * The latch must be owned by the current process, ie. it must be a
   * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
   * associated with the current process by calling OwnLatch.
   *
!  * Returns bit field indicating which condition(s) caused the wake-up. Note
!  * that if multiple wake-up conditions are true, there is no guarantee that
!  * we return all of them in one call, but we will return at least one.
   */
! int
! WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, long timeout)
  {
! 	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, wakeEvents, 

Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-04 Thread Florian Pflug
On Jul4, 2011, at 17:53 , Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
   Under Linux, select() may report a socket file descriptor as ready for
   reading,  while nevertheless a subsequent read blocks.  This could for
   example happen when data has arrived but  upon  examination  has  wrong
   checksum and is discarded.  There may be other circumstances in which a
   file descriptor is spuriously reported as ready.  Thus it may be  safer
   to use O_NONBLOCK on sockets that should not block.
 
 So in theory, on Linux you might WaitLatch might sometimes incorrectly return 
 WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH. None of the callers check for WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH return 
 code, they call PostmasterIsAlive() before assuming the postmaster has died, 
 so that won't affect correctness at the moment. I doubt that scenario can 
 even happen in our case, select() on a pipe that is never written to. But 
 maybe we should add add an assertion to WaitLatch to assert that if select() 
 reports that the postmaster pipe has been closed, PostmasterIsAlive() also 
 returns false.

The correct solution would be to read() from the pipe after select()
returns, and only return WL_POSTMASTER_DEATCH if the read doesn't return
EAGAIN. To prevent that read() from blocking if the read event was indeed
spurious, O_NONBLOCK must be set on the pipe but that patch does that already.

Btw, with the death-watch / life-sign / whatever infrastructure in place,
shouldn't PostmasterIsAlive() be using that instead of getppid() / kill(0)?

best regards,
Florian Pflug


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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-04 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 4 July 2011 16:53, Heikki Linnakangas
heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com wrote:
 Ok, here's a new patch, addressing the issues Fujii raised, and with a bunch
 of stylistic changes of my own. Also, I committed a patch to remove
 silent_mode, so the fork_process() changes are now gone. I'm going to sleep
 over this and review once again tomorrow, and commit if it still looks good
 to me and no-one else reports new issues.

Looks good.

 I don't like the names POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH and POSTMASTER_FD_OWN. At a quick
 glance, it's not at all clear which is which. I couldn't come up with better
 names, so for now I just added some comments to clarify that. I would find
 WRITE/READ more clear, but to make sense of that you need to how the pipe is
 used. Any suggestions or opinions on that?

We could bikeshed about that until the cows come home, but we're not
going to come up with names that make the purpose of each evident at a
glance - it's too involved. If we could, we would have thought of them
already. Besides, I've probably already written all the client code
those macros will ever have.

On 4 July 2011 17:36, Florian Pflug f...@phlo.org wrote:
 On Jul4, 2011, at 17:53 , Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
       Under Linux, select() may report a socket file descriptor as ready 
 for
       reading,  while nevertheless a subsequent read blocks.  This could 
 for
       example happen when data has arrived but  upon  examination  has  
 wrong
       checksum and is discarded.  There may be other circumstances in which 
 a
       file descriptor is spuriously reported as ready.  Thus it may be  
 safer
       to use O_NONBLOCK on sockets that should not block.

 So in theory, on Linux you might WaitLatch might sometimes incorrectly 
 return WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH. None of the callers check for 
 WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH return code, they call PostmasterIsAlive() before 
 assuming the postmaster has died, so that won't affect correctness at the 
 moment. I doubt that scenario can even happen in our case, select() on a 
 pipe that is never written to. But maybe we should add add an assertion to 
 WaitLatch to assert that if select() reports that the postmaster pipe has 
 been closed, PostmasterIsAlive() also returns false.

 The correct solution would be to read() from the pipe after select()
 returns, and only return WL_POSTMASTER_DEATCH if the read doesn't return
 EAGAIN. To prevent that read() from blocking if the read event was indeed
 spurious, O_NONBLOCK must be set on the pipe but that patch does that already.

Let's have some perspective on this. We're talking about a highly
doubtful chance that latches may wake when they shouldn't. Latches are
typically expected to wake up for a variety of reasons, and if that
occurred in the archiver's case with my patch applied, I think we'd
just go asleep again without anything happening. It seems likely that
latch client code in general will never trip up on this, as long as
its not exclusively relying on the waitLatch() return value to report
pm death.

Maybe we should restore the return value of WaitLatch to its previous
format (so it doesn't return a bitmask)? That way, we don't report
that the Postmaster died, and therefore clients are required to call
PostmasterIsAlive() to be sure. In any case, I'm in favour of the
assertion.

 Btw, with the death-watch / life-sign / whatever infrastructure in place,
 shouldn't PostmasterIsAlive() be using that instead of getppid() / kill(0)?

Hmm, maybe. That seems like a separate issue though, that can be
addressed with another patch. It does have the considerable
disadvantage of making Heikki's proposed assertion failure useless. Is
the implementation of PostmasterIsAlive() really a problem at the
moment?

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-04 Thread Florian Pflug
On Jul4, 2011, at 23:11 , Peter Geoghegan wrote:
 On 4 July 2011 17:36, Florian Pflug f...@phlo.org wrote:
 On Jul4, 2011, at 17:53 , Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
   Under Linux, select() may report a socket file descriptor as ready 
 for
   reading,  while nevertheless a subsequent read blocks.  This could 
 for
   example happen when data has arrived but  upon  examination  has  
 wrong
   checksum and is discarded.  There may be other circumstances in 
 which a
   file descriptor is spuriously reported as ready.  Thus it may be  
 safer
   to use O_NONBLOCK on sockets that should not block.
 
 So in theory, on Linux you might WaitLatch might sometimes incorrectly 
 return WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH. None of the callers check for 
 WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH return code, they call PostmasterIsAlive() before 
 assuming the postmaster has died, so that won't affect correctness at the 
 moment. I doubt that scenario can even happen in our case, select() on a 
 pipe that is never written to. But maybe we should add add an assertion to 
 WaitLatch to assert that if select() reports that the postmaster pipe has 
 been closed, PostmasterIsAlive() also returns false.
 
 The correct solution would be to read() from the pipe after select()
 returns, and only return WL_POSTMASTER_DEATCH if the read doesn't return
 EAGAIN. To prevent that read() from blocking if the read event was indeed
 spurious, O_NONBLOCK must be set on the pipe but that patch does that 
 already.
 
 Let's have some perspective on this. We're talking about a highly
 doubtful chance that latches may wake when they shouldn't.

Yeah, as long as there's just a spurious wake up, sure. However,
having WaitLatch() indicate a postmaster death in that case seems
dangerous. Some caller, sooner or later, is bound to get it wrong,
i.e. forget to re-check PostmasterIsAlive.

 Maybe we should restore the return value of WaitLatch to its previous
 format (so it doesn't return a bitmask)? That way, we don't report
 that the Postmaster died, and therefore clients are required to call
 PostmasterIsAlive() to be sure.

That'd solve the issue too.

 In any case, I'm in favour of the assertion.

I don't really see the value in that assertion. It'd cause spurious
assertion failures in the case of spurious events reported by select().
If we do expect such event, we should close the hole instead of asserting.
If we don't, then what's the point of the assert.

BTW, do we currently retry the select() on EINTR (meaning a signal has
arrived)? If we don't, that'd be an additional source of spurious returns
from select.

 Btw, with the death-watch / life-sign / whatever infrastructure in place,
 shouldn't PostmasterIsAlive() be using that instead of getppid() / kill(0)?
 
 Hmm, maybe. That seems like a separate issue though, that can be
 addressed with another patch. It does have the considerable
 disadvantage of making Heikki's proposed assertion failure useless. Is
 the implementation of PostmasterIsAlive() really a problem at the
 moment?

I'm not sure that there is currently a guarantee that PostmasterIsAlive
will returns false immediately after select() indicates postmaster
death. If e.g. the postmaster's parent is still running (which happens
for example if you launch postgres via daemontools), the re-parenting of
backends to init might not happen until the postmaster zombie has been
vanquished by its parent's call of waitpid(). It's not entirely
inconceivable for getppid() to then return the (dead) postmaster's pid
until that waitpid() call has occurred.

But agreed, this is probably best handled by a separate patch.

best regards,
Florian Pflug


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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-04 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 4 July 2011 22:42, Florian Pflug f...@phlo.org wrote:
 If we do expect such event, we should close the hole instead of asserting.
 If we don't, then what's the point of the assert.

You can say the same thing about any assertion. I'm not going to
attempt to close the hole because I don't believe that there is one. I
would be happy to see your read() from the pipe after select() test
asserted though.

 BTW, do we currently retry the select() on EINTR (meaning a signal has
 arrived)? If we don't, that'd be an additional source of spurious returns
 from select.

Why might it be? WaitLatch() is currently documented to potentially
have its timeout invalidated by the process receiving a signal, which
is the exact opposite problem. We do account for this within the
archiver calling code though, and I remark upon it in a comment there.

 I'm not sure that there is currently a guarantee that PostmasterIsAlive
 will returns false immediately after select() indicates postmaster
 death. If e.g. the postmaster's parent is still running (which happens
 for example if you launch postgres via daemontools), the re-parenting of
 backends to init might not happen until the postmaster zombie has been
 vanquished by its parent's call of waitpid(). It's not entirely
 inconceivable for getppid() to then return the (dead) postmaster's pid
 until that waitpid() call has occurred.

Yes, this did occur to me - it's hard to reason about what exactly
happens here, and probably impossible to have the behaviour guaranteed
across platforms, however unlikely it seems. I'd like to hear what
Heikki has to say about asserting or otherwise verifying postmaster
death in the case of apparent postmaster death wake-up.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-07-04 Thread Fujii Masao
On Tue, Jul 5, 2011 at 1:36 AM, Florian Pflug f...@phlo.org wrote:
 On Jul4, 2011, at 17:53 , Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
       Under Linux, select() may report a socket file descriptor as ready 
 for
       reading,  while nevertheless a subsequent read blocks.  This could 
 for
       example happen when data has arrived but  upon  examination  has  
 wrong
       checksum and is discarded.  There may be other circumstances in which 
 a
       file descriptor is spuriously reported as ready.  Thus it may be  
 safer
       to use O_NONBLOCK on sockets that should not block.

 So in theory, on Linux you might WaitLatch might sometimes incorrectly 
 return WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH. None of the callers check for 
 WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH return code, they call PostmasterIsAlive() before 
 assuming the postmaster has died, so that won't affect correctness at the 
 moment. I doubt that scenario can even happen in our case, select() on a 
 pipe that is never written to. But maybe we should add add an assertion to 
 WaitLatch to assert that if select() reports that the postmaster pipe has 
 been closed, PostmasterIsAlive() also returns false.

 The correct solution would be to read() from the pipe after select()
 returns, and only return WL_POSTMASTER_DEATCH if the read doesn't return
 EAGAIN. To prevent that read() from blocking if the read event was indeed
 spurious, O_NONBLOCK must be set on the pipe but that patch does that already.

+1

The syslogger read() from the pipe after select(), then it thinks EOF
has arrived and
there is no longer write-side process if the return value of read() is
just zero.

Regards,

-- 
Fujii Masao
NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION
NTT Open Source Software Center

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-30 Thread Fujii Masao
On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 10:41 AM, Peter Geoghegan pe...@2ndquadrant.com wrote:
 Attached is patch that addresses Fujii's third and most recent set of 
 concerns.

Thanks for updating the patch!

 I think that Heikki is currently taking another look at my work,
 because he indicates in a new message to the list a short time ago
 that while reviewing my patch, he realised that there may be an
 independent problem with silent_mode. I will wait for his remarks
 before producing another version of the patch that incorporates those
 two small changes.

Yes, we should wait for the comments from Heikki. But, I have another
comments;

InitPostmasterDeathWatchHandle() can be static function because it's
used only in postmaster.c.

ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle() can call ereport(FATAL) before
StartChildProcess() or BackendStartup() calls on_exit_reset() and resets
MyProcPid. This looks unsafe. If that ereport(FATAL) is unfortunately
called, a process other than postmaster would perform the postmaster's
proc-exit handlers. And that ereport(FATAL) would report wrong pid
when %p is specified in log_line_prefix. What about closing the pipe in
ClosePostmasterPorts() and removing ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle()?

+   /*
+* Set O_NONBLOCK to allow checking for the fd's presence with a 
select() call
+*/
+   if (fcntl(postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH], F_SETFL, 
O_NONBLOCK))
+   {
+   ereport(FATAL,
+   (errcode_for_socket_access(),
+errmsg(failed to set the postmaster death watching 
fd's flags: %m)));
+   }

I don't think that the pipe fd needs to be set to non-blocking mode
since we don't read or write on it.

http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/error-style-guide.html
According to the error style guide, I think that it's better to change the
following messages:

+errmsg( pipe() call failed to create pipe to monitor 
postmaster
death: %m)));

could not create pipe for monitoring postmaster death: %m

+errmsg(failed to close file descriptor associated with
postmaster death in child process)));

could not close postmaster pipe: %m

Regards,

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NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION
NTT Open Source Software Center

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-30 Thread Heikki Linnakangas

On 30.06.2011 09:36, Fujii Masao wrote:

On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 10:41 AM, Peter Geogheganpe...@2ndquadrant.com  wrote:

Attached is patch that addresses Fujii's third and most recent set of concerns.


Thanks for updating the patch!


I think that Heikki is currently taking another look at my work,
because he indicates in a new message to the list a short time ago
that while reviewing my patch, he realised that there may be an
independent problem with silent_mode. I will wait for his remarks
before producing another version of the patch that incorporates those
two small changes.


Yes, we should wait for the comments from Heikki. But, I have another
comments;


Here's a WIP patch with some mostly cosmetic changes I've done this far. 
I haven't tested the Windows code at all yet. It seems that no-one is 
objecting to removing silent_mode altogether, so I'm going to do that 
before committing this patch.


--
  Heikki Linnakangas
  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com
diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
index a7f5373..155acea 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
@@ -10165,7 +10165,7 @@ retry:
 	/*
 	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
 	 */
-	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, 500L);
+	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, WL_LATCH_SET | WL_TIMEOUT, 500L);
 	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
 }
 else
diff --git a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
index 6dae7c9..1a2e141 100644
--- a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
+++ b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
@@ -93,6 +93,7 @@
 #endif
 
 #include miscadmin.h
+#include postmaster/postmaster.h
 #include storage/latch.h
 #include storage/shmem.h
 
@@ -179,31 +180,32 @@ DisownLatch(volatile Latch *latch)
  * Wait for given latch to be set or until timeout is exceeded.
  * If the latch is already set, the function returns immediately.
  *
- * The 'timeout' is given in microseconds, and -1 means wait forever.
- * On some platforms, signals cause the timeout to be restarted, so beware
- * that the function can sleep for several times longer than the specified
- * timeout.
+ * The 'timeout' is given in microseconds. It must be = 0 if WL_TIMEOUT
+ * event is given, otherwise it is ignored. On some platforms, signals cause
+ * the timeout to be restarted, so beware that the function can sleep for
+ * several times longer than the specified timeout.
  *
  * The latch must be owned by the current process, ie. it must be a
  * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
  * associated with the current process by calling OwnLatch.
  *
- * Returns 'true' if the latch was set, or 'false' if timeout was reached.
+ * Returns bit field indicating which condition(s) caused the wake-up. Note
+ * that if multiple wake-up conditions are true, there is no guarantee that
+ * we return all of them in one call, but we will return at least one.
  */
-bool
-WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, long timeout)
+int
+WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, long timeout)
 {
-	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, PGINVALID_SOCKET, false, false, timeout)  0;
+	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, wakeEvents, PGINVALID_SOCKET, timeout);
 }
 
 /*
- * Like WaitLatch, but will also return when there's data available in
- * 'sock' for reading or writing. Returns 0 if timeout was reached,
- * 1 if the latch was set, 2 if the socket became readable or writable.
+ * Like WaitLatch, but with an extra socket argument for WL_SOCKET_*
+ * conditions.
  */
 int
-WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
-  bool forWrite, long timeout)
+WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, pgsocket sock,
+  long timeout)
 {
 	struct timeval tv,
 			   *tvp = NULL;
@@ -212,19 +214,26 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 	int			rc;
 	int			result = 0;
 
+	Assert(wakeEvents != 0);
+
+	/* Ignore WL_SOCKET_* events if no valid socket is given */
+	if (sock == PGINVALID_SOCKET)
+		wakeEvents = ~(WL_SOCKET_READABLE | WL_SOCKET_WRITEABLE);
+
 	if (latch-owner_pid != MyProcPid)
 		elog(ERROR, cannot wait on a latch owned by another process);
 
 	/* Initialize timeout */
-	if (timeout = 0)
+	if (wakeEvents  WL_TIMEOUT)
 	{
+		Assert(timeout = 0);
 		tv.tv_sec = timeout / 100L;
 		tv.tv_usec = timeout % 100L;
 		tvp = tv;
 	}
 
 	waiting = true;
-	for (;;)
+	do
 	{
 		int			hifd;
 
@@ -235,16 +244,28 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 		 * do that), and the select() will return immediately.
 		 */
 		drainSelfPipe();
-		if (latch-is_set)
+		if (latch-is_set  (wakeEvents  WL_LATCH_SET))
 		{
-			result = 1;
+			result |= WL_LATCH_SET;
+			/*
+			 * Leave loop immediately, avoid blocking again. We don't attempt
+			 * to report any other events that might also be satisfied.
+			 */
 			break;

Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-30 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 30 June 2011 08:58, Heikki Linnakangas
heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com wrote:

 Here's a WIP patch with some mostly cosmetic changes I've done this far. I
 haven't tested the Windows code at all yet. It seems that no-one is
 objecting to removing silent_mode altogether, so I'm going to do that before
 committing this patch.

I'm mostly happy with the changes you've made, but I note:

Fujii is of course correct in pointing out that
InitPostmasterDeathWatchHandle() should be a static function.

s/the implementation, as described in unix_latch.c/the implementation/
 - This is my mistake. I see no reason to mention the .c file. Use
ctags.

Minor niggle, but there is a little errant whitespace at the top of
fork_process.c.

(wakeEvents  WL_TIMEOUT) != 0 -- I was going to note that this was
redundant, but then I remembered that stupid MSVC warning, which I
wouldn't have seen here because I didn't use it for my Windows build
due to an infuriating issue with winflex (Our own Cygwin built version
of flex for windows). I wouldn't have expected that when it was set to
build C though. I'm not sure exactly why it isn't necessary in other
places where we're (arguably) doing the same thing.


On 30 June 2011 07:36, Fujii Masao masao.fu...@gmail.com wrote:

 ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle() can call ereport(FATAL) before
 StartChildProcess() or BackendStartup() calls on_exit_reset() and resets
 MyProcPid. This looks unsafe. If that ereport(FATAL) is unfortunately
 called, a process other than postmaster would perform the postmaster's
 proc-exit handlers. And that ereport(FATAL) would report wrong pid
 when %p is specified in log_line_prefix. What about closing the pipe in
 ClosePostmasterPorts() and removing ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle()?

Hmm. That is a valid criticism. I'd rather move the
ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle() call into ClosePostmasterPorts()
though.

 http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/error-style-guide.html
 According to the error style guide, I think that it's better to change the
 following messages:

I don't think that the way I've phrased my error messages is
inconsistent with that style guide, excepty perhaps the pipe()
reference, but if you feel it's important to try and use could not,
I have no objections.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-30 Thread Robert Haas
On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 5:47 AM, Peter Geoghegan pe...@2ndquadrant.com wrote:
 I don't think that the way I've phrased my error messages is
 inconsistent with that style guide, excepty perhaps the pipe()
 reference, but if you feel it's important to try and use could not,
 I have no objections.

I  like Fujii's rephrasing - we don't usually mention the name of the
system call.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-24 Thread Fujii Masao
On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 9:11 PM, Peter Geoghegan pe...@2ndquadrant.com wrote:
                rc = WaitForMultipleObjects(numevents, events, FALSE,
                                                           (timeout = 0) ? 
 (timeout / 1000) : INFINITE);
 -               if (rc == WAIT_FAILED)
 +               if ( (wakeEvents  WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH) 
 +                        !PostmasterIsAlive(true))

 After WaitForMultipleObjects() detects the death of postmaster,
 WaitForSingleObject()
 is called in PostmasterIsAlive(). In this case, what code does
 WaitForSingleObject() return?
 I wonder if WaitForSingleObject() returns the code other than
 WAIT_TIMEOUT and really
 can detect the death of postmaster.

 As noted up-thread, the fact that the archiver does wake and finish on
 Postmaster death can be clearly observed on Windows. I'm not sure why
 you wonder that, as this is fairly standard use of
 PostmasterIsAlive().

Because, if PostmasterHandle is an auto-reset event object, its event state
would be automatically reset just after WaitForMultipleObjects() detects
the postmaster death event, I was afraid. But your observation proved that
my concern was not right.

I have another comments:

+#ifndef WIN32
+   /*
+* Initialise mechanism that allows waiting latch clients
+* to wake on postmaster death, to finish their
+* remaining business
+*/
+   InitPostmasterDeathWatchHandle();
+#endif

Calling this function before creating TopMemoryContext looks unsafe. What if
the function calls ereport(FATAL)?

That ereport() can be called before postgresql.conf is read, i.e., before GUCs
for error reporting are set. Is this OK? If not,
InitPostmasterDeathWatchHandle()
should be moved after SelectConfigFiles().

+#ifndef WIN32
+int postmaster_alive_fds[2];
+#endif

postmaster_alive_fds[] should be initialized to {-1, -1}?

Regards,

-- 
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NIPPON TELEGRAPH AND TELEPHONE CORPORATION
NTT Open Source Software Center

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-24 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 24 June 2011 12:30, Fujii Masao masao.fu...@gmail.com wrote:
 +#ifndef WIN32
 +       /*
 +        * Initialise mechanism that allows waiting latch clients
 +        * to wake on postmaster death, to finish their
 +        * remaining business
 +        */
 +       InitPostmasterDeathWatchHandle();
 +#endif

 Calling this function before creating TopMemoryContext looks unsafe. What if
 the function calls ereport(FATAL)?

 That ereport() can be called before postgresql.conf is read, i.e., before GUCs
 for error reporting are set. Is this OK? If not,
 InitPostmasterDeathWatchHandle()
 should be moved after SelectConfigFiles().

I see no reason to take the risk that it might at some point - I've moved it.

 +#ifndef WIN32
 +int postmaster_alive_fds[2];
 +#endif

 postmaster_alive_fds[] should be initialized to {-1, -1}?

Yes, they should. That works better.

I think that Heikki is currently taking another look at my work,
because he indicates in a new message to the list a short time ago
that while reviewing my patch, he realised that there may be an
independent problem with silent_mode. I will wait for his remarks
before producing another version of the patch that incorporates those
two small changes.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-24 Thread Peter Geoghegan
Attached is patch that addresses Fujii's third and most recent set of concerns.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan       http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services
diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
index 4952d22..bfe6bcd 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
@@ -10158,7 +10158,7 @@ retry:
 	/*
 	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
 	 */
-	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, 500L);
+	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, WL_LATCH_SET | WL_TIMEOUT, 500L);
 	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
 }
 else
diff --git a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
index 6dae7c9..6d2e3a1 100644
--- a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
+++ b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
@@ -93,6 +93,7 @@
 #endif
 
 #include miscadmin.h
+#include postmaster/postmaster.h
 #include storage/latch.h
 #include storage/shmem.h
 
@@ -188,22 +189,25 @@ DisownLatch(volatile Latch *latch)
  * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
  * associated with the current process by calling OwnLatch.
  *
- * Returns 'true' if the latch was set, or 'false' if timeout was reached.
+ * Returns bit field indicating which condition(s) caused the wake-up.
+ *
+ * Note that there is no guarantee that callers will have all wake-up conditions
+ * returned, but we will report at least one.
  */
-bool
-WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, long timeout)
+int
+WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, long timeout)
 {
-	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, PGINVALID_SOCKET, false, false, timeout)  0;
+	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, wakeEvents, PGINVALID_SOCKET, timeout);
 }
 
 /*
  * Like WaitLatch, but will also return when there's data available in
- * 'sock' for reading or writing. Returns 0 if timeout was reached,
- * 1 if the latch was set, 2 if the socket became readable or writable.
+ * 'sock' for reading or writing.
+ *
+ * Returns same bit mask and makes same guarantees as WaitLatch.
  */
 int
-WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
-  bool forWrite, long timeout)
+WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, pgsocket sock, long timeout)
 {
 	struct timeval tv,
 			   *tvp = NULL;
@@ -211,12 +215,15 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 	fd_set		output_mask;
 	int			rc;
 	int			result = 0;
+	bool		found = false;
+
+	Assert(wakeEvents != 0);
 
 	if (latch-owner_pid != MyProcPid)
 		elog(ERROR, cannot wait on a latch owned by another process);
 
 	/* Initialize timeout */
-	if (timeout = 0)
+	if (timeout = 0  (wakeEvents  WL_TIMEOUT))
 	{
 		tv.tv_sec = timeout / 100L;
 		tv.tv_usec = timeout % 100L;
@@ -224,7 +231,7 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 	}
 
 	waiting = true;
-	for (;;)
+	do
 	{
 		int			hifd;
 
@@ -235,16 +242,31 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 		 * do that), and the select() will return immediately.
 		 */
 		drainSelfPipe();
-		if (latch-is_set)
+		if (latch-is_set  (wakeEvents  WL_LATCH_SET))
 		{
-			result = 1;
+			result |= WL_LATCH_SET;
+			found = true;
+			/* Leave loop immediately, avoid blocking again.
+			 *
+			 * Don't attempt to report any other reason
+			 * for returning to callers that may have
+			 * happened to coincide.
+			 */
 			break;
 		}
 
 		FD_ZERO(input_mask);
 		FD_SET(selfpipe_readfd, input_mask);
 		hifd = selfpipe_readfd;
-		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET  forRead)
+
+		if (wakeEvents  WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH)
+		{
+			FD_SET(postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH], input_mask);
+			if (postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH]  hifd)
+hifd = postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH];
+		}
+
+		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET  (wakeEvents  WL_SOCKET_READABLE))
 		{
 			FD_SET(sock, input_mask);
 			if (sock  hifd)
@@ -252,7 +274,7 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 		}
 
 		FD_ZERO(output_mask);
-		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET  forWrite)
+		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET  (wakeEvents  WL_SOCKET_WRITEABLE))
 		{
 			FD_SET(sock, output_mask);
 			if (sock  hifd)
@@ -268,20 +290,33 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 	(errcode_for_socket_access(),
 	 errmsg(select() failed: %m)));
 		}
-		if (rc == 0)
+		if (rc == 0  (wakeEvents  WL_TIMEOUT))
 		{
 			/* timeout exceeded */
-			result = 0;
-			break;
+			result |= WL_TIMEOUT;
+			found = true;
 		}
-		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET 
-			((forRead  FD_ISSET(sock, input_mask)) ||
-			 (forWrite  FD_ISSET(sock, output_mask
+		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET)
 		{
-			result = 2;
-			break;/* data available in socket */
+			if ((wakeEvents  WL_SOCKET_READABLE )  FD_ISSET(sock, input_mask))
+			{
+result |= WL_SOCKET_READABLE;
+found = true; /* data available in socket */
+	

Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-22 Thread Peter Geoghegan
Attached patch addresses Fujii's more recent concerns.

On 22 June 2011 04:54, Fujii Masao masao.fu...@gmail.com wrote:

 +WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, long timeout)
 +WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, pgsocket
 sock, long timeout)

 If 'wakeEvent' is zero, we cannot get out of WaitLatch(). Something like
 Assert(waitEvents != 0) is required? Or, WaitLatch() should always wait
 on latch even when 'waitEvents' is zero?

Well, not waking when the client has not specified an event to wake on
is the correct thing to do in that case. It would also be inherently
undesirable, so I'd be happy to guard against it using an assertion.
Both implementations now use one.

 In unix_latch.c, select() in WaitLatchOrSocket() checks the timeout only when
 WL_TIMEOUT is set in 'wakeEvents'. OTOH, in win32_latch.c,
 WaitForMultipleObjects()
 in WaitLatchOrSocket() always checks the timeout even if WL_TIMEOUT is not
 given. Is this intentional?

No, it's a mistake. Fixed.

 +               else if (rc == WAIT_OBJECT_0 + 2 
 +                                ((wakeEvents  WL_SOCKET_READABLE) || 
 (wakeEvents  WL_SOCKET_WRITEABLE)))

 Another corner case: when WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH and WL_SOCKET_READABLE
 are given and 'sock' is set to PGINVALID_SOCKET, we can wrongly pass through 
 the
 above check. If this OK?

I see your point - Assert(sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET) could be violated.
We fix the issue now by setting and checking a bool that simply
indicates that we're interested in sockets.

                rc = WaitForMultipleObjects(numevents, events, FALSE,
                                                           (timeout = 0) ? 
 (timeout / 1000) : INFINITE);
 -               if (rc == WAIT_FAILED)
 +               if ( (wakeEvents  WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH) 
 +                        !PostmasterIsAlive(true))

 After WaitForMultipleObjects() detects the death of postmaster,
 WaitForSingleObject()
 is called in PostmasterIsAlive(). In this case, what code does
 WaitForSingleObject() return?
 I wonder if WaitForSingleObject() returns the code other than
 WAIT_TIMEOUT and really
 can detect the death of postmaster.

As noted up-thread, the fact that the archiver does wake and finish on
Postmaster death can be clearly observed on Windows. I'm not sure why
you wonder that, as this is fairly standard use of
PostmasterIsAlive().  I've verified that the waitLatch() call
correctly reports Postmaster death in its return code on Windows, and
indeed that it actually wakes up.

Are you suggesting that there should be a defensive else if{ } for the
case where PostmasterIsAlive() incorrectly reports that the PM is
alive due to some implementation related race-condition, and we've
already considered every other possibility? Well, I suppose that's not
necessary, because we will loop until we find a reason - it's okay to
miss it the first time around, because whatever caused
WaitForMultipleObjects() to wake up will cause it to immediately
return for the next iteration.

In any case, we don't rely on the PostmasterIsAlive() call at all
anymore, so it doesn't matter. We just look at rc's value now, as we
do for every other case, though it's a bit trickier when checking
Postmaster death. Similarly, we don't have a PostmasterIsAlive() call
within the unix latch implementation anymore.

 +       if (fcntl(postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH], F_GETFL)  0)
 +       {
 +               ereport(FATAL,
 +                       (errcode_for_socket_access(),
 +                        errmsg(failed to set the postmaster death watching 
 fd's flags:
 %s, strerror(errno;
 +       }

 Is the above check really required? It's harmless, but looks unnecessary.

Yes, it's not possible for it to detect an error condition now. Removed.

 '%m' should be used instead of '%s' and 'strerror(errno)'.

It is of course better to use the simpler, built-in facility. Fixed.

-- 
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PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services
diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
index 4952d22..bfe6bcd 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
@@ -10158,7 +10158,7 @@ retry:
 	/*
 	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
 	 */
-	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, 500L);
+	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, WL_LATCH_SET | WL_TIMEOUT, 500L);
 	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
 }
 else
diff --git a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
index 6dae7c9..6d2e3a1 100644
--- a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
+++ b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
@@ -93,6 +93,7 @@
 #endif
 
 #include miscadmin.h
+#include postmaster/postmaster.h
 #include storage/latch.h
 #include storage/shmem.h
 
@@ -188,22 +189,25 @@ DisownLatch(volatile Latch *latch)
  * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
  * 

Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-21 Thread Peter Geoghegan
Thanks for giving this your attention Fujii. Attached patch addresses
your concerns.

On 20 June 2011 05:53, Fujii Masao masao.fu...@gmail.com wrote:
 'hifd' should be initialized to 'selfpipe_readfd' before the above
 'if' block. Otherwise,
 'hifd = postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH]' might have no effect.

That's an oversight that I should have caught. Fixed.

 Why does the archive still need to wake up periodically?

That is consistent with its earlier behaviour...she wakes up
occasionally to allow herself to be proactive. This comment does not
refer to the frequent updates that currently occur within the tight
polling loop. I think any concern about that would apply equally to
the original, unpatched code.

 Is the variable 'flag' really required? It's not used by fcntl() to
 set the fd nonblocking.

Yes, it's superfluous. Removed.

 Is FNONBLOCK equal to O_NONBLOCK? If yes, we should use O_NONBLOCK
 for the sake of consistency? In other code (e.g., noblock.c), O_NONBLOCK is 
 used
 rather than FNONBLOCK.

FNONBLOCK is just an alias for O_NONBLOCK, so it seems reasonable to
be consistent in which variant we use. I have found suggestions that
it might break the build on OSX, so if that's true there's an
excellent reason to prefer the latter.

 I think that it's worth that walsender checks the postmaster death event. No?

It does check it, but only in the same way that it always has (a tight
polling loop). I would like to make walsender use the new
functionality. That is another patch though, that I thought best to
have independently reviewed, only when this patch is committed. I've
only made the walsender use the new interface, changing as little as
possible and not affecting walsender's behaviour, as a stopgap towards
that patch.

-- 
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PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services
diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
index aa0b029..691ac42 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
@@ -10161,7 +10161,7 @@ retry:
 	/*
 	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
 	 */
-	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, 500L);
+	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, WL_LATCH_SET | WL_TIMEOUT, 500L);
 	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
 }
 else
diff --git a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
index 6dae7c9..f97d838 100644
--- a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
+++ b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
@@ -93,7 +93,9 @@
 #endif
 
 #include miscadmin.h
+#include postmaster/postmaster.h
 #include storage/latch.h
+#include storage/pmsignal.h
 #include storage/shmem.h
 
 /* Are we currently in WaitLatch? The signal handler would like to know. */
@@ -188,22 +190,25 @@ DisownLatch(volatile Latch *latch)
  * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
  * associated with the current process by calling OwnLatch.
  *
- * Returns 'true' if the latch was set, or 'false' if timeout was reached.
+ * Returns bit field indicating which condition(s) caused the wake-up.
+ *
+ * Note that there is no guarantee that callers will have all wake-up conditions
+ * returned, but we will report at least one.
  */
-bool
-WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, long timeout)
+int
+WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, long timeout)
 {
-	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, PGINVALID_SOCKET, false, false, timeout)  0;
+	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, wakeEvents, PGINVALID_SOCKET, timeout);
 }
 
 /*
  * Like WaitLatch, but will also return when there's data available in
- * 'sock' for reading or writing. Returns 0 if timeout was reached,
- * 1 if the latch was set, 2 if the socket became readable or writable.
+ * 'sock' for reading or writing.
+ *
+ * Returns same bit mask and makes same guarantees as WaitLatch.
  */
 int
-WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
-  bool forWrite, long timeout)
+WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, pgsocket sock, long timeout)
 {
 	struct timeval tv,
 			   *tvp = NULL;
@@ -211,12 +216,13 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 	fd_set		output_mask;
 	int			rc;
 	int			result = 0;
+	bool		found = false;
 
 	if (latch-owner_pid != MyProcPid)
 		elog(ERROR, cannot wait on a latch owned by another process);
 
 	/* Initialize timeout */
-	if (timeout = 0)
+	if (timeout = 0  (wakeEvents  WL_TIMEOUT))
 	{
 		tv.tv_sec = timeout / 100L;
 		tv.tv_usec = timeout % 100L;
@@ -224,7 +230,7 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 	}
 
 	waiting = true;
-	for (;;)
+	do
 	{
 		int			hifd;
 
@@ -235,16 +241,31 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 		 * do that), and the select() will return immediately.
 		 */
 		drainSelfPipe();
-		if (latch-is_set)
+		if (latch-is_set  (wakeEvents  WL_LATCH_SET))
 		{
-			

Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-21 Thread Fujii Masao
On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 6:22 PM, Peter Geoghegan pe...@2ndquadrant.com wrote:
 Thanks for giving this your attention Fujii. Attached patch addresses
 your concerns.

Thanks for updating the patch! I have a few comments;

+WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, long timeout)
+WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, pgsocket
sock, long timeout)

If 'wakeEvent' is zero, we cannot get out of WaitLatch(). Something like
Assert(waitEvents != 0) is required? Or, WaitLatch() should always wait
on latch even when 'waitEvents' is zero?

In unix_latch.c, select() in WaitLatchOrSocket() checks the timeout only when
WL_TIMEOUT is set in 'wakeEvents'. OTOH, in win32_latch.c,
WaitForMultipleObjects()
in WaitLatchOrSocket() always checks the timeout even if WL_TIMEOUT is not
given. Is this intentional?

+   else if (rc == WAIT_OBJECT_0 + 2 
+((wakeEvents  WL_SOCKET_READABLE) || 
(wakeEvents  WL_SOCKET_WRITEABLE)))

Another corner case: when WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH and WL_SOCKET_READABLE
are given and 'sock' is set to PGINVALID_SOCKET, we can wrongly pass through the
above check. If this OK?

rc = WaitForMultipleObjects(numevents, events, FALSE,
   (timeout = 0) ? 
(timeout / 1000) : INFINITE);
-   if (rc == WAIT_FAILED)
+   if ( (wakeEvents  WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH) 
+!PostmasterIsAlive(true))

After WaitForMultipleObjects() detects the death of postmaster,
WaitForSingleObject()
is called in PostmasterIsAlive(). In this case, what code does
WaitForSingleObject() return?
I wonder if WaitForSingleObject() returns the code other than
WAIT_TIMEOUT and really
can detect the death of postmaster.

+   if (fcntl(postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH], F_GETFL)  0)
+   {
+   ereport(FATAL,
+   (errcode_for_socket_access(),
+errmsg(failed to set the postmaster death watching 
fd's flags:
%s, strerror(errno;
+   }

Is the above check really required? It's harmless, but looks unnecessary.

+errmsg( pipe() call failed to create pipe to monitor 
postmaster
death: %s, strerror(errno;
+errmsg(failed to set the postmaster death watching 
fd's flags:
%s, strerror(errno;
+errmsg(failed to set the postmaster death watching 
fd's flags:
%s, strerror(errno;

'%m' should be used instead of '%s' and 'strerror(errno)'.

Regards,

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-19 Thread Peter Geoghegan
I took another look at this this evening, and realised that my
comments could be a little clearer.

Attached revision cleans them up a bit.

-- 
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PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services
diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
index aa0b029..691ac42 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
@@ -10161,7 +10161,7 @@ retry:
 	/*
 	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
 	 */
-	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, 500L);
+	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, WL_LATCH_SET | WL_TIMEOUT, 500L);
 	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
 }
 else
diff --git a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
index 6dae7c9..f65d389 100644
--- a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
+++ b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
@@ -93,7 +93,9 @@
 #endif
 
 #include miscadmin.h
+#include postmaster/postmaster.h
 #include storage/latch.h
+#include storage/pmsignal.h
 #include storage/shmem.h
 
 /* Are we currently in WaitLatch? The signal handler would like to know. */
@@ -188,22 +190,25 @@ DisownLatch(volatile Latch *latch)
  * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
  * associated with the current process by calling OwnLatch.
  *
- * Returns 'true' if the latch was set, or 'false' if timeout was reached.
+ * Returns bit field indicating which condition(s) caused the wake-up.
+ *
+ * Note that there is no guarantee that callers will have all wake-up conditions
+ * returned, but we will report at least one.
  */
-bool
-WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, long timeout)
+int
+WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, long timeout)
 {
-	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, PGINVALID_SOCKET, false, false, timeout)  0;
+	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, wakeEvents, PGINVALID_SOCKET, timeout);
 }
 
 /*
  * Like WaitLatch, but will also return when there's data available in
- * 'sock' for reading or writing. Returns 0 if timeout was reached,
- * 1 if the latch was set, 2 if the socket became readable or writable.
+ * 'sock' for reading or writing.
+ *
+ * Returns same bit mask and makes same guarantees as WaitLatch.
  */
 int
-WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
-  bool forWrite, long timeout)
+WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, pgsocket sock, long timeout)
 {
 	struct timeval tv,
 			   *tvp = NULL;
@@ -211,12 +216,13 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 	fd_set		output_mask;
 	int			rc;
 	int			result = 0;
+	bool		found = false;
 
 	if (latch-owner_pid != MyProcPid)
 		elog(ERROR, cannot wait on a latch owned by another process);
 
 	/* Initialize timeout */
-	if (timeout = 0)
+	if (timeout = 0  (wakeEvents  WL_TIMEOUT))
 	{
 		tv.tv_sec = timeout / 100L;
 		tv.tv_usec = timeout % 100L;
@@ -224,7 +230,7 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 	}
 
 	waiting = true;
-	for (;;)
+	do
 	{
 		int			hifd;
 
@@ -235,16 +241,30 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 		 * do that), and the select() will return immediately.
 		 */
 		drainSelfPipe();
-		if (latch-is_set)
+		if (latch-is_set  (wakeEvents  WL_LATCH_SET))
 		{
-			result = 1;
+			result |= WL_LATCH_SET;
+			found = true;
+			/* Leave loop immediately, avoid blocking again.
+			 *
+			 * Don't attempt to report any other reason
+			 * for returning to callers that may have
+			 * happened to coincide.
+			 */
 			break;
 		}
 
 		FD_ZERO(input_mask);
 		FD_SET(selfpipe_readfd, input_mask);
+
+		if (wakeEvents  WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH)
+		{
+			FD_SET(postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH], input_mask);
+			if (postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH]  hifd)
+hifd = postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH];
+		}
 		hifd = selfpipe_readfd;
-		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET  forRead)
+		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET  (wakeEvents  WL_SOCKET_READABLE))
 		{
 			FD_SET(sock, input_mask);
 			if (sock  hifd)
@@ -252,7 +272,7 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 		}
 
 		FD_ZERO(output_mask);
-		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET  forWrite)
+		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET  (wakeEvents  WL_SOCKET_WRITEABLE))
 		{
 			FD_SET(sock, output_mask);
 			if (sock  hifd)
@@ -268,20 +288,35 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 	(errcode_for_socket_access(),
 	 errmsg(select() failed: %m)));
 		}
-		if (rc == 0)
+		if (rc == 0  (wakeEvents  WL_TIMEOUT))
 		{
 			/* timeout exceeded */
-			result = 0;
-			break;
+			result |= WL_TIMEOUT;
+			found = true;
 		}
-		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET 
-			((forRead  FD_ISSET(sock, input_mask)) ||
-			 (forWrite  FD_ISSET(sock, output_mask
+		if (sock != PGINVALID_SOCKET)
 		{
-			result = 2;
-			break;/* data available in socket */
+			if ((wakeEvents  

Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-19 Thread Fujii Masao
On Mon, Jun 20, 2011 at 1:00 AM, Peter Geoghegan pe...@2ndquadrant.com wrote:
 I took another look at this this evening, and realised that my
 comments could be a little clearer.

 Attached revision cleans them up a bit.

Since I'm not familiar with Windows, I haven't read the code related
to Windows. But
the followings are my comments on your patch.

+   if (wakeEvents  WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH)
+   {
+   FD_SET(postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH], 
input_mask);
+   if (postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH]  hifd)
+   hifd = 
postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH];
+   }
hifd = selfpipe_readfd;

'hifd' should be initialized to 'selfpipe_readfd' before the above
'if' block. Otherwise,
'hifd = postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH]' might have no effect.

+   time_t   curtime = time(NULL);
+   unsigned int timeout_secs  = (unsigned int) 
PGARCH_AUTOWAKE_INTERVAL -
+   (unsigned int) (curtime - 
last_copy_time);
+   WaitLatch(mainloop_latch, WL_LATCH_SET | WL_TIMEOUT |
WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH, timeout_secs * 100L);

Why does the archive still need to wake up periodically?

+   flags |= FNONBLOCK;
+   if (fcntl(postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH], F_SETFL, 
FNONBLOCK))

Is the variable 'flag' really required? It's not used by fcntl() to
set the fd nonblocking.

Is FNONBLOCK equal to O_NONBLOCK? If yes, we should use O_NONBLOCK
for the sake of consistency? In other code (e.g., noblock.c), O_NONBLOCK is used
rather than FNONBLOCK.

+   WaitLatchOrSocket(MyWalSnd-latch,
+ WL_LATCH_SET | 
WL_SOCKET_READABLE | (pq_is_send_pending()?
WL_SOCKET_WRITEABLE:0) |  WL_TIMEOUT,
+ MyProcPort-sock,

I think that it's worth that walsender checks the postmaster death event. No?

Regards,

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-17 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 16 June 2011 16:30, Heikki Linnakangas
heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com wrote:
 This patch breaks silent_mode=on. In silent_mode, postmaster forks early on,
 to detach from the controlling tty. It uses fork_process() for that, which
 with patch closes the write end of the postmaster-alive pipe, but that's
 wrong because the child becomes the postmaster process.

Attached patch revision addresses that issue. There is a thin
macro-based wrapper around fork_process(), depending on whether or not
it is desirable to ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle() after forking.
All callers to fork_process() are unchanged.

 On a stylistic note, the extern declaration in unix_latch.c is ugly,
 extern declarations should be in header files.

Just an oversight.

 Come to think of it, I feel
 the Init- and ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle() functions should go to
 postmaster.c. postmaster_alive_fds[] and PostmasterHandle serve the same
 purpose, declaration and initialization of both should be kept together,
 perhaps by moving the initialization of PostmasterHandle into Init- and
 ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle().

I've removed the no coinciding wakeEvents comment that you objected
to (or clarified that other wakeEvents can coincide), and have
documented the fact that we make no guarantees about reporting all
events that caused a latch wake-up. We will report at least one
though.

I've moved  Init- and ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle() into postmaster.c .

I have to disagree with the idea of moving initialisation of
PostmasterHandle into InitPostmasterDeathWatchHandle(). Both Init-,
and Release- functions, which only exist on Unix builds, initialise
and subsequently release the watching handle. There's a symmetry to
it. If we created a win32 InitPostmasterDeathWatchHandle(), we'd have
no reason to create a win32 Release-, so the symmetry would be lost.
Also, PostmasterHandle does not exist for the express purpose of latch
clients monitoring postmaster death, unlike postmaster_alive_fds[] -
it existed before now. I guess I don't feel too strongly about it
though. It just doesn't seem like a maintainability win.

On 16 June 2011 15:49, Florian Pflug f...@phlo.org wrote:
 I noticed to your patch doesn't seem to register a SIGIO handler, i.e.
 it doesn't use async IO machinery (or rather a tiny part thereof) to
 get asynchronously notified if the postmaster dies.

 If that is on purpose, you can remove the fsetown() call, as it serves
 no purpose without such a handler I think. Or, you might want to add
 such a signal handler, and make it simply do kill(getpid(), SIGTERM).

It is on purpose - I'm not interested in asynchronous notification for
the time being at least, because it doesn't occur to me how we can
handle that failure usefully in an asynchronous fashion. Anyway, that
code has been simplified, and my intent clarified. Thanks.

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diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
index aa0b029..691ac42 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
@@ -10161,7 +10161,7 @@ retry:
 	/*
 	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
 	 */
-	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, 500L);
+	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, WL_LATCH_SET | WL_TIMEOUT, 500L);
 	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
 }
 else
diff --git a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
index 6dae7c9..e88631d 100644
--- a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
+++ b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
@@ -93,7 +93,9 @@
 #endif
 
 #include miscadmin.h
+#include postmaster/postmaster.h
 #include storage/latch.h
+#include storage/pmsignal.h
 #include storage/shmem.h
 
 /* Are we currently in WaitLatch? The signal handler would like to know. */
@@ -188,22 +190,26 @@ DisownLatch(volatile Latch *latch)
  * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
  * associated with the current process by calling OwnLatch.
  *
- * Returns 'true' if the latch was set, or 'false' if timeout was reached.
+ * Returns bit field indicating which condition(s) caused the wake-up.
+ * Note that there is guarantee that callers will have all wake-up conditions
+ * returned, but we will report at least one.
  */
-bool
-WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, long timeout)
+int
+WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, long timeout)
 {
-	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, PGINVALID_SOCKET, false, false, timeout)  0;
+	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, wakeEvents, PGINVALID_SOCKET, timeout);
 }
 
 /*
  * Like WaitLatch, but will also return when there's data available in
- * 'sock' for reading or writing. Returns 0 if timeout was reached,
- * 1 if the latch was set, 2 if the socket became readable or writable.
+ * 'sock' for reading or writing.
+ *
+ * Returns bit field indicating which condition(s) caused the 

Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-16 Thread Peter Geoghegan
I had another quick look-over this patch, and realised that I made a
minor mistake:

+void
+ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle(void)
+{
+   /* MyProcPid won't have been set yet */
+   Assert(PostmasterPid != getpid());
+   /* Please don't ask twice */
+   Assert(postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_OWN] != -1);
+   /* Release parent's ownership fd - only postmaster should hold it */
+   if (close(postmaster_alive_fds[ POSTMASTER_FD_OWN]))
+   {
+   ereport(FATAL,
+   (errcode_for_socket_access(),
+errmsg(Failed to close file descriptor associated with
Postmaster death in child process %d, MyProcPid)));
+   }
+   postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_OWN] = -1;
+}
+

MyProcPid is used in this errmsg, and as noted in the first comment,
it isn't expected to be initialised when
ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle() is called. Therefore, MyProcPid
should be replaced with a call to getpid(), just as it is for
Assert(PostmasterPid != getpid()).

I suppose that you could take the view that MyProcPid ought to be
initialised before the function is called, but I thought this was the
least worst way. Better to do it this way than to touch all the
different ways in which MyProcPid might be initialised, I suspect.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-16 Thread Heikki Linnakangas

On 16.06.2011 15:07, Peter Geoghegan wrote:

I had another quick look-over this patch, and realised that I made a
minor mistake:

+void
+ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle(void)
+{
+   /* MyProcPid won't have been set yet */
+   Assert(PostmasterPid != getpid());
+   /* Please don't ask twice */
+   Assert(postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_OWN] != -1);
+   /* Release parent's ownership fd - only postmaster should hold it */
+   if (close(postmaster_alive_fds[ POSTMASTER_FD_OWN]))
+   {
+   ereport(FATAL,
+   (errcode_for_socket_access(),
+errmsg(Failed to close file descriptor associated with
Postmaster death in child process %d, MyProcPid)));
+   }
+   postmaster_alive_fds[POSTMASTER_FD_OWN] = -1;
+}
+

MyProcPid is used in this errmsg, and as noted in the first comment,
it isn't expected to be initialised when
ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle() is called. Therefore, MyProcPid
should be replaced with a call to getpid(), just as it is for
Assert(PostmasterPid != getpid()).

I suppose that you could take the view that MyProcPid ought to be
initialised before the function is called, but I thought this was the
least worst way. Better to do it this way than to touch all the
different ways in which MyProcPid might be initialised, I suspect.


Hmm, I'm not sure having the pid in that error message is too useful in 
the first place. The process was just spawned, and it will die at that 
error. When you try to debug that sort of error, what you would compare 
the pid with? And you can include the pid in log_line_prefix if it turns 
out to be useful after all.


PS. error messages should begin with lower-case letter.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-16 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 16 June 2011 13:15, Heikki Linnakangas
heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com wrote:

 Hmm, I'm not sure having the pid in that error message is too useful in the
 first place. The process was just spawned, and it will die at that error.
 When you try to debug that sort of error, what you would compare the pid
 with? And you can include the pid in log_line_prefix if it turns out to be
 useful after all.

All fair points. FWIW, I think it's pretty unlikely that anyone will
ever see this error message.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-16 Thread Heikki Linnakangas

Peter Geoghegan wrote:

--- 247,277 
 * do that), and the select() will return immediately.
 */
drainSelfPipe();
!   if (latch-is_set  (wakeEvents  WL_LATCH_SET))
!   {
!   result |= WL_LATCH_SET;
!   found = true;
!   /*
!* Leave loop immediately, avoid blocking again.
!* Since latch is set, no other factor could have
!* coincided that could make us wake up
!* independently of the latch being set, so no
!* need to worry about having missed something.
!*/
break;
}


I don't understand that comment. Why can't e.g postmaster death happen 
at the same time as a latch is set? I think the code is fine as it is, 
we just need to document that if there are several events that would 
wake up WaitLatch(), we make no promise that we return all of them in 
the return value. I believe all the callers would be fine with that.


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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-16 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 16 June 2011 15:27, Heikki Linnakangas
heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com wrote:

 I don't understand that comment. Why can't e.g postmaster death happen at
 the same time as a latch is set? I think the code is fine as it is, we just
 need to document that if there are several events that would wake up
 WaitLatch(), we make no promise that we return all of them in the return
 value. I believe all the callers would be fine with that.

I see your perspective...there is a window for the Postmaster to die
after the latch is set, but before it returns control to clients, and
this won't be reported. I would argue that Postmaster death didn't
actually coincide with the latch being set, because it didn't actually
cause the select() to unblock, and therefore we don't have a
responsibility to report it. Even if that view doesn't stand up to
scrutiny, and it may not, it is a fairly academic point, because, as
you say, it's unlikely that clients will ever much care. I'd be happy
to document that we make no promises, on the off chance that some
future caller might care.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-16 Thread Heikki Linnakangas
This patch breaks silent_mode=on. In silent_mode, postmaster forks early 
on, to detach from the controlling tty. It uses fork_process() for that, 
which with patch closes the write end of the postmaster-alive pipe, but 
that's wrong because the child becomes the postmaster process.


On a stylistic note, the extern declaration in unix_latch.c is ugly, 
extern declarations should be in header files. Come to think of it, I 
feel the Init- and ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle() functions should 
go to postmaster.c. postmaster_alive_fds[] and PostmasterHandle serve 
the same purpose, declaration and initialization of both should be kept 
together, perhaps by moving the initialization of PostmasterHandle into 
Init- and ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle().


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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-06-16 Thread Alvaro Herrera
Excerpts from Peter Geoghegan's message of jue jun 16 08:42:39 -0400 2011:
 On 16 June 2011 13:15, Heikki Linnakangas
 heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com wrote:
 
  Hmm, I'm not sure having the pid in that error message is too useful in the
  first place. The process was just spawned, and it will die at that error.
  When you try to debug that sort of error, what you would compare the pid
  with? And you can include the pid in log_line_prefix if it turns out to be
  useful after all.
 
 All fair points. FWIW, I think it's pretty unlikely that anyone will
 ever see this error message.

... in which case the getpid() call is not that expensive anyway.

I agree that the PID should be part of the log_line_prefix though, which
is why I was trying to propose we include it (or the session ID) in the
default log_line_prefix along with a suitable timestamp.

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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-05-26 Thread Heikki Linnakangas

On 24.05.2011 23:43, Peter Geoghegan wrote:

Attached is the latest revision of the latch implementation that
monitors postmaster death, plus the archiver client that now relies on
that new functionality and thereby works well without a tight
PostmasterIsAlive() polling loop.


The Unix-stuff looks good to me at a first glance.


The lifesign terminology has been dropped. We now close() the file
descriptor that represents ownership - the write end of our
anonymous pipe - in each child backend directly in the forking
machinery (the thin fork() wrapper for the non-EXEC_BACKEND case),
through a call to ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle(). We don't have
to do that on Windows, and we don't.


There's one reference left to life sign in comments. (FWIW, I don't 
have a problem with that terminology myself)



Disappointingly, and despite a big effort, there doesn't seem to be a
way to have the win32 WaitForMultipleObjects() call wake on postmaster
death in addition to everything else in the same way that select()
does, so there are now two blocking calls, each in a thread of its own
(when the latch code is interested in postmaster death - otherwise,
it's single threaded as before).

The threading stuff (in particular, the fact that we used a named pipe
in a thread where the name of the pipe comes from the process PID) is
inspired by win32 signal emulation, src/backend/port/win32/signal.c .


That's a pity, all those threads and named pipes are a bit gross for a 
safety mechanism like this.


Looking at the MSDN docs again, can't you simply include 
PostmasterHandle in the WaitForMultipleObjects() call to have it return 
when the process dies? It should be possible to mix different kind of 
handles in one call, including process handles. Does it not work as 
advertised?



You can easily observe that it works as advertised on Windows by
starting Postgres with archiving, using task manager to monitor
processes, and doing the following to the postmaster (assuming it has
a PID of 1234). This is the Windows equivalent of kill -9 :

C:\Users\Petertaskkill /pid 1234 /F

You'll see that it takes about a second for the archiver to exit. All
processes exit.


Hmm, shouldn't the archiver exit almost instantaneously now that there's 
no polling anymore?


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Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-05-26 Thread Peter Geoghegan
On 26 May 2011 11:22, Heikki Linnakangas
heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com wrote:
 The Unix-stuff looks good to me at a first glance.

Good.

 There's one reference left to life sign in comments. (FWIW, I don't have a
 problem with that terminology myself)

Should have caught that one. Removed.

 Looking at the MSDN docs again, can't you simply include PostmasterHandle in
 the WaitForMultipleObjects() call to have it return when the process dies?
 It should be possible to mix different kind of handles in one call,
 including process handles. Does it not work as advertised?

Uh, I might have done that, had I been aware of PostmasterHandle. I
tried various convoluted ways to make it do what ReadFile() did for
me, before finally biting the bullet and just using ReadFile() in a
separate thread. I've tried adding PostmasterHandle though, and it
works well - it appears to behave exactly the same as my original
implementation.

This simplifies things considerably. Now, on win32, things are
actually simpler than on Unix.

 You'll see that it takes about a second for the archiver to exit. All
 processes exit.

 Hmm, shouldn't the archiver exit almost instantaneously now that there's no
 polling anymore?

Actually, just one lagger process sometimes remains that takes maybe
as long as a second, a bit longer than the others. I assumed that it
was the archiver, but I was probably wrong. I also didn't see that
very consistently.

Attached revision doesn't use any threads or pipes on win32. It's far
neater there. I'm still seeing that lagger process (which is an
overstatement) at times, so I guess it is normal. On Windows, there is
no detailed PS output, so I actually don't know what the lagger
process is, and no easy way to determine that immediately occurs to
me.

-- 
Peter Geoghegan       http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services
diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
index e71090f..b1d38f5 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
@@ -10150,7 +10150,7 @@ retry:
 	/*
 	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
 	 */
-	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, 500L);
+	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, WL_LATCH_SET | WL_TIMEOUT, 500L);
 	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
 }
 else
diff --git a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
index 6dae7c9..fa1d382 100644
--- a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
+++ b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
@@ -94,6 +94,7 @@
 
 #include miscadmin.h
 #include storage/latch.h
+#include storage/pmsignal.h
 #include storage/shmem.h
 
 /* Are we currently in WaitLatch? The signal handler would like to know. */
@@ -108,6 +109,15 @@ static void initSelfPipe(void);
 static void drainSelfPipe(void);
 static void sendSelfPipeByte(void);
 
+/* 
+ * Constants that represent which of a pair of fds given
+ * to pipe() is watched and owned in the context of 
+ * dealing with postmaster death
+ */
+#define POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH 0
+#define POSTMASTER_FD_OWN 1
+
+extern int postmaster_alive_fds[2];
 
 /*
  * Initialize a backend-local latch.
@@ -188,22 +198,22 @@ DisownLatch(volatile Latch *latch)
  * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
  * associated with the current process by calling OwnLatch.
  *
- * Returns 'true' if the latch was set, or 'false' if timeout was reached.
+ * Returns bit field indicating which condition(s) caused the wake-up.
  */
-bool
-WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, long timeout)
+int
+WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, long timeout)
 {
-	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, PGINVALID_SOCKET, false, false, timeout)  0;
+	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, wakeEvents, PGINVALID_SOCKET, timeout);
 }
 
 /*
  * Like WaitLatch, but will also return when there's data available in
- * 'sock' for reading or writing. Returns 0 if timeout was reached,
- * 1 if the latch was set, 2 if the socket became readable or writable.
+ * 'sock' for reading or writing.
+ *
+ * Returns bit field indicating which condition(s) caused the wake-up.
  */
 int
-WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
-  bool forWrite, long timeout)
+WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, pgsocket sock, long timeout)
 {
 	struct timeval tv,
 			   *tvp = NULL;
@@ -211,12 +221,13 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 	fd_set		output_mask;
 	int			rc;
 	int			result = 0;
+	bool		found = false;
 
 	if (latch-owner_pid != MyProcPid)
 		elog(ERROR, cannot wait on a latch owned by another process);
 
 	/* Initialize timeout */
-	if (timeout = 0)
+	if (timeout = 0  (wakeEvents  WL_TIMEOUT))
 	{
 		tv.tv_sec = timeout / 100L;
 		tv.tv_usec = timeout % 100L;
@@ -224,7 +235,7 @@ WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
 	}
 
 	waiting = true;
-	for (;;)
+	do
 	{
 		int	

Re: [HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-05-26 Thread Dave Page
On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Peter Geoghegan pe...@2ndquadrant.com wrote:
 Attached revision doesn't use any threads or pipes on win32. It's far
 neater there. I'm still seeing that lagger process (which is an
 overstatement) at times, so I guess it is normal. On Windows, there is
 no detailed PS output, so I actually don't know what the lagger
 process is, and no easy way to determine that immediately occurs to
 me.

Process Explorer might help you there:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653



-- 
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Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

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[HACKERS] Latch implementation that wakes on postmaster death on both win32 and Unix

2011-05-24 Thread Peter Geoghegan
Attached is the latest revision of the latch implementation that
monitors postmaster death, plus the archiver client that now relies on
that new functionality and thereby works well without a tight
PostmasterIsAlive() polling loop.

On second thought, it is reasonable for the patch to be evaluated with
the archiver changes. Any problems that we'll have with latch changes
are likely problems that all WL_POSTMASTER_DEATH latch clients will
have, so we might as well include the simplest such client initially.
Once I have buy-in on the latch changes, the archiver work becomes
uncontroversial, I think.

The lifesign terminology has been dropped. We now close() the file
descriptor that represents ownership - the write end of our
anonymous pipe - in each child backend directly in the forking
machinery (the thin fork() wrapper for the non-EXEC_BACKEND case),
through a call to ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle(). We don't have
to do that on Windows, and we don't.

I've handled the non-win32 EXEC_BACKEND case, which I understand just
exists for testing purposes. I've done the usual BackendParameters
stuff.

A ReleasePostmasterDeathWatchHandle() call is unnecessary on win32
(the function doesn't exist there - the need to call it on Unix is a
result of its implementation). I'd like to avoid having calls to it in
each auxiliary process. It should be called in a single sweet spot
that doesn't put any burden on child process authors to remember to
call it themselves.

Disappointingly, and despite a big effort, there doesn't seem to be a
way to have the win32 WaitForMultipleObjects() call wake on postmaster
death in addition to everything else in the same way that select()
does, so there are now two blocking calls, each in a thread of its own
(when the latch code is interested in postmaster death - otherwise,
it's single threaded as before).

The threading stuff (in particular, the fact that we used a named pipe
in a thread where the name of the pipe comes from the process PID) is
inspired by win32 signal emulation, src/backend/port/win32/signal.c .

You can easily observe that it works as advertised on Windows by
starting Postgres with archiving, using task manager to monitor
processes, and doing the following to the postmaster (assuming it has
a PID of 1234). This is the Windows equivalent of kill -9 :

C:\Users\Petertaskkill /pid 1234 /F

You'll see that it takes about a second for the archiver to exit. All
processes exit.

Thoughts?

-- 
Peter Geoghegan       http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services
diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
index e71090f..b1d38f5 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
@@ -10150,7 +10150,7 @@ retry:
 	/*
 	 * Wait for more WAL to arrive, or timeout to be reached
 	 */
-	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, 500L);
+	WaitLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch, WL_LATCH_SET | WL_TIMEOUT, 500L);
 	ResetLatch(XLogCtl-recoveryWakeupLatch);
 }
 else
diff --git a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
index 6dae7c9..c60986c 100644
--- a/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
+++ b/src/backend/port/unix_latch.c
@@ -94,6 +94,7 @@
 
 #include miscadmin.h
 #include storage/latch.h
+#include storage/pmsignal.h
 #include storage/shmem.h
 
 /* Are we currently in WaitLatch? The signal handler would like to know. */
@@ -108,6 +109,15 @@ static void initSelfPipe(void);
 static void drainSelfPipe(void);
 static void sendSelfPipeByte(void);
 
+/* 
+ * Constants that represent which of a pair of fds given
+ * to pipe() is watched and owned in the context of 
+ * dealing with postmaster death
+ */
+#define POSTMASTER_FD_WATCH 0
+#define POSTMASTER_FD_OWN 1
+
+extern int postmaster_alive_fds[2];
 
 /*
  * Initialize a backend-local latch.
@@ -188,22 +198,22 @@ DisownLatch(volatile Latch *latch)
  * backend-local latch initialized with InitLatch, or a shared latch
  * associated with the current process by calling OwnLatch.
  *
- * Returns 'true' if the latch was set, or 'false' if timeout was reached.
+ * Returns bit field indicating which condition(s) caused the wake-up.
  */
-bool
-WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, long timeout)
+int
+WaitLatch(volatile Latch *latch, int wakeEvents, long timeout)
 {
-	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, PGINVALID_SOCKET, false, false, timeout)  0;
+	return WaitLatchOrSocket(latch, wakeEvents, PGINVALID_SOCKET, timeout);
 }
 
 /*
  * Like WaitLatch, but will also return when there's data available in
- * 'sock' for reading or writing. Returns 0 if timeout was reached,
- * 1 if the latch was set, 2 if the socket became readable or writable.
+ * 'sock' for reading or writing.
+ *
+ * Returns bit field indicating which condition(s) caused the wake-up.
  */
 int
-WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile Latch *latch, pgsocket sock, bool forRead,
-  bool forWrite, long timeout)
+WaitLatchOrSocket(volatile