Re: Streaming replication on win32, still broken

On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 6:28 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> If you send me your amazon id, I can get you premissions on my private
> image. I plan to clean it up and make it public, just haven't gotten
> around to it yet...

Thanks for your concern! I'll send the ID when I complete the preparation.

And, fortunately?, when I set wal_sync_method to open_sync, the problem was
reproduced in the linux, too. The cause is that the data that is written by
walreceiver is not aligned, even if O_DIRECT is used. On win32, O_DIRECT is
used by default. So the problem always happened on win32.

I propose two solution ideas:

1. O_DIRECT is somewhat harmful in the standby since the data written by
walreceiver is read by the startup process immediately. So, how about
not making only walreceiver use O_DIRECT?

2. Straightforwardly observe the alignment rule. Since the received WAL
data might start at the middle of WAL block, walreceiver needs to keep
the last half-written WAL block for alignment. OTOH since the received
data might end at the middle of WAL block, walreceiver needs zero-padding.
As a result, walreceiver writes the set of the last WAL block, received
data and zero-padding.

Which is better? Or do you have another better idea?

Regards,

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