Re: trying again to get incremental backup

On 2023-Nov-16, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> On 2023-Oct-04, Robert Haas wrote:

> > - Right now, I have a hard-coded 60 second timeout for WAL
> > summarization. If you try to take an incremental backup and the WAL
> > summaries you need don't show up within 60 seconds, the backup times
> > out. I think that's a reasonable default, but should it be
> > configurable? If yes, should that be a GUC or, perhaps better, a
> > pg_basebackup option?
>
> I'd rather have a way for the server to provide diagnostics on why the
> summaries aren't being produced. Maybe a server running under valgrind
> is going to fail and need a longer one, but otherwise a hardcoded
> timeout seems sufficient.
>
> You did say later that you thought summary files would just go from one
> checkpoint to the next. So the only question is at what point the file
> for the last checkpoint (i.e. from the previous one up to the one
> requested by pg_basebackup) is written. If walsummarizer keeps almost
> the complete state in memory and just waits for the checkpoint record to
> write it, then it's probably okay.

On 2023-Nov-16, Alvaro Herrera wrote:

> On 2023-Nov-16, Robert Haas wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Nov 16, 2023 at 5:21 AM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org> wrote:

> > > It's not clear to me if WalSummarizerCtl->pending_lsn if fulfilling some
> > > purpose or it's just a leftover from prior development. I see it's only
> > > read in an assertion ... Maybe if we think this cross-check is
> > > important, it should be turned into an elog? Otherwise, I'd remove it.
> >
> > I've been thinking about that. One thing I'm not quite sure about
> > though is introspection. Maybe there should be a function that shows
> > summarized_tli and summarized_lsn from WalSummarizerData, and maybe it
> > should expose pending_lsn too.
>
> True.

Putting those two thoughts together, I think pg_basebackup with
--progress could tell you "still waiting for the summary file up to LSN
%X/%X to appear, and the walsummarizer is currently handling lsn %X/%X"
or something like that. This would probably require two concurrent
connections, one to run BASE_BACKUP and another to inquire server state;
but this should easy enough to integrate together with parallel
basebackup later.

--
Álvaro Herrera PostgreSQL Developer — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/