Re: Re: [GENERAL] 9.4.1 -> 9.4.2 problem: could not access status of transaction 1

Bruce Momjian wrote:

> I think we need to step back and look at the brain power required to
> unravel the mess we have made regarding multi-xact and fixes. (I bet
> few people can even remember which multi-xact fixes went into which
> releases --- I can't.) Instead of working on actual features, we are
> having to do this complex diagnosis because we didn't do a thorough
> analysis at the time a pattern of multi-xact bugs started to appear.
> Many projects deal with this compound bug debt regularly, but we have
> mostly avoided this fate.

Well, it's pretty obvious that if we had had a glimpse of the nature of
the issues back then, we wouldn't have committed the patch. The number
of ends that we left loose we now know to be huge, but we didn't know
that back then. (I, at least, certainly didn't.)

Simon told me when this last one showed up that what we need at this
point is a way to turn the whole thing off to stop it from affecting
users anymore. I would love to be able to do that, because the whole
situation has become stressing, but I don't see a way. Heck, if we
could implement Heikki's TED idea or something similar, I would be up
for back-patching it so that people can pg_upgrade from postgresql-9.3
to postgresql-ted-9.3, and just forget any further multixact pain.
Don't think that's really doable, though. As far as I can see, for
branches 9.3 and 9.4 the best we can do is soldier on and get these bugs
fixed, hoping that this time they are really the last [serious] ones.

For 9.5, I concur with Andres that we'd do good to change the way
truncations are done by WAL-logging more stuff and keep more data in
pg_control, to avoid all these nasty games. And for 9.6, find a better
representation of the data so that the durable data is stored separately
from the volatile data.

--
Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services