it a lot more useful for determining which standby is most up-to-date,
for example. There was long discussions on whether overwriting existing
existing WAL makes sense to begin with, and whether we should do some more
extensive variable renaming, but this change nevertheless seems quite
uncontroversial.
Fujii Masao, reviewed by Jeff Janes, Robert Haas, Stephen Frost.
Standby optionally sends back information about oldestXmin of queries
which is then checked and applied to the WALSender's proc->xmin.
GetOldestXmin() is modified slightly to agree with GetSnapshotData(),
so that all backends on primary include WALSender within their snapshots.
Note this does nothing to change the snapshot xmin on either master or
standby. Feedback piggybacks on the standby reply message.
vacuum_defer_cleanup_age is no longer used on standby, though parameter
still exists on primary, since some use cases still exist.
Simon Riggs, review comments from Fujii Masao, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
the standby has written, flushed, and applied the WAL. At the moment, this
is for informational purposes only, the values are only shown in
pg_stat_replication system view, but in the future they will also be needed
for synchronous replication.
Extracted from Simon riggs' synchronous replication patch by Robert Haas, with
some tweaking by me.
max_standby_streaming_delay, and revise the implementation to avoid assuming
that timestamps found in WAL records can meaningfully be compared to clock
time on the standby server. Instead, the delay limits are compared to the
elapsed time since we last obtained a new WAL segment from archive or since
we were last "caught up" to WAL data arriving via streaming replication.
This avoids problems with clock skew between primary and standby, as well
as other corner cases that the original coding would misbehave in, such
as the primary server having significant idle time between transactions.
Per my complaint some time ago and considerable ensuing discussion.
Do some desultory editing on the hot standby documentation, too.
and current server clock time to SR data messages. These are not currently
used on the slave side but seem likely to be useful in future, and it'd be
better not to change the SR protocol after release. Per discussion.
Also do some minor code review and cleanup on walsender.c, and improve the
protocol documentation.
enabled. Bypassing the kernel cache is counter-productive in that case,
because the archiver/walsender process will read from the WAL file
soon after it's written, and if it's not cached the read will cause
a physical read, eating I/O bandwidth available on the WAL drive.
Also, walreceiver process does unaligned writes, so disable O_DIRECT
in walreceiver process for that reason too.
restore_command, if the connection to the primary server is lost. This
ensures that the standby can recover automatically, if the connection is
lost for a long time and standby falls behind so much that the required
WAL segments have been archived and deleted in the master.
This also makes standby_mode useful without streaming replication; the
server will keep retrying restore_command every few seconds until the
trigger file is found. That's the same basic functionality pg_standby
offers, but without the bells and whistles.
To implement that, refactor the ReadRecord/FetchRecord functions. The
FetchRecord() function introduced in the original streaming replication
patch is removed, and all the retry logic is now in a new function called
XLogReadPage(). XLogReadPage() is now responsible for executing
restore_command, launching walreceiver, and waiting for new WAL to arrive
from primary, as required.
This also changes the life cycle of walreceiver. When launched, it now only
tries to connect to the master once, and exits if the connection fails, or
is lost during streaming for any reason. The startup process detects the
death, and re-launches walreceiver if necessary.
binary, revert PGDLLIMPORT decoration of global variables. I'm not sure
if there's any real harm from unnecessary PGDLLIMPORTs, but these are all
internal variables that external modules really shouldn't be messing
with. ThisTimeLineID still needs PGDLLIMPORT.
walreceiver as whole into a dynamically loaded module, split the
libpq-specific parts of it into dynamically loaded module and keep the rest
in the main backend binary.
Although Tom fixed the Windows compilation problems with the old walreceiver
module already, this is a cleaner division of labour and makes the code
more readable. There's also the prospect of adding new transport methods
as pluggable modules in the future, which this patch makes easier, though for
now the API between libpqwalreceiver and walreceiver process should be
considered private.
The libpq-specific module is now in src/backend/replication/libpqwalreceiver,
and the part linked with postgres binary is in
src/backend/replication/walreceiver.c.
This includes two new kinds of postmaster processes, walsenders and
walreceiver. Walreceiver is responsible for connecting to the primary server
and streaming WAL to disk, while walsender runs in the primary server and
streams WAL from disk to the client.
Documentation still needs work, but the basics are there. We will probably
pull the replication section to a new chapter later on, as well as the
sections describing file-based replication. But let's do that as a separate
patch, so that it's easier to see what has been added/changed. This patch
also adds a new section to the chapter about FE/BE protocol, documenting the
protocol used by walsender/walreceivxer.
Bump catalog version because of two new functions,
pg_last_xlog_receive_location() and pg_last_xlog_replay_location(), for
monitoring the progress of replication.
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me
