Re: [HACKERS] Restricting maximum keep segments by repslots

On 2020-Apr-28, Kyotaro Horiguchi wrote:

> > Anyway I think this patch should fix it also -- instead of adding a new
> > flag, we just rely on the existing flags (since do_checkpoint must have
> > been set correctly from the flags earlier in that block.)
>
> Since the added (!do_checkpoint) check is reached with
> do_checkpoint=false at server start and at archive_timeout intervals,
> the patch makes checkpointer run a busy-loop at that timings, and that
> loop lasts until a checkpoint is actually executed.
>
> What we need to do here is not forgetting the fact that the latch has
> been set even if the latch itself gets reset before reaching to
> WaitLatch.

After a few more false starts :-) I think one easy thing we can do
without the additional boolean flag is to call SetLatch there in the
main loop if we see that ckpt_flags is nonzero.

(I had two issues with the boolean flag. One is that the comment in
ReqCheckpointHandler needed an update to, essentially, say exactly the
opposite of what it was saying; such a change was making me very
uncomfortable. The other is that the place where the flag was reset in
CheckpointerMain() was ... not really appropriate; or it could have been
appropriate if the flag was called, say, "CheckpointerMainNoSleepOnce".
Because "RequestPending" was the wrong name to use, because if the flag
was for really request pending, then we should reset it inside the "if
do_checkpoint" block .. but as I understand this would cause the
busy-loop behavior you described.)

> The attached patch on 019_replslot_limit.pl does the commands above
> automatically. It sometimes succeed but fails in most cases, at least
> for me.

With the additional SetLatch, the test passes reproducibly for me.
Before the patch, it failed ten out of ten times I ran it.

--
Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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