Re: How should the waiting backends behave in sync rep?

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 10:06 AM, Fujii Masao <masao(dot)fujii(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> How should the backends waiting for replication behave when
> synchrnous_standby_names
> is set to '' and the configuration file is reloaded? Now they keep
> waiting for the ACK from the
> standby. But I think that it's more natural for them to get out of the
> wait state and complete
> the transaction in that case. If we'll change them in that way, we
> would no longer need
> something like "pg_ctl standalone" which I mentioned in another thread. Thought?

I think so. Looking at assign_synchronous_standby_names, the
following code just looks wrong:

if (doit && list_length(elemlist) > 0)
sync_standbys_defined = true;

Once sync_standbys_defined becomes true, there's no way for it to ever
become false again. That can't be right. That means that if you
disable sync rep by zeroing out synchronous_standby_names, backends
that already existed at the time you made the change will continue to
act as though sync rep is enabled until they exit.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company