Re: Reviewing freeze map code

On Tue, Jun 14, 2016 at 8:11 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>> I noticed that the tuples that it reported were always offset 1 in a
>>> page, and that the page always had a maxoff over a couple of hundred,
>>> and that we called record_corrupt_item because VM_ALL_VISIBLE returned
>>> true but HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum on the first tuple returned
>>> HEAPTUPLE_DELETE_IN_PROGRESS instead of the expected HEAPTUPLE_LIVE.
>>> It did that because HEAP_XMAX_COMMITTED was not set and
>>> TransactionIdIsInProgress returned true for xmax.
>>
>> So this seems like it might be a visibility map bug rather than a bug
>> in the test code, but I'm not completely sure of that. How was it
>> legitimate to mark the page as all-visible if a tuple on the page
>> still had a live xmax? If xmax is live and not just a locker then the
>> tuple is not visible to the transaction that wrote xmax, at least.
>
> Ah, wait a minute. I see how this could happen. Hang on, let me
> update the pg_visibility patch.

The problem should be fixed in the attached revision of
pg_check_visible. I think what happened is:

1. pg_check_visible computed an OldestXmin.
2. Some transaction committed.
3. VACUUM computed a newer OldestXmin and marked a page all-visible with it.
4. pg_check_visible then used its older OldestXmin to check the
visibility of tuples on that page, and saw delete-in-progress as a
result.

I added a guard against a similar scenario involving xmin in the last
version of this patch, but forgot that we need to protect xmax in the
same way. With this version of the patch, I can no longer get any
TIDs to pop up out of pg_check_visible in my testing. (I haven't run
your test script for lack of the proper Python environment...)

--
Robert Haas
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