Re: Exit walsender before confirming remote flush in logical replication

On Mon, Feb 6, 2023 at 10:33 AM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
>
> On February 5, 2023 8:29:19 PM PST, Amit Kapila <amit(dot)kapila16(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >>
> >> But that seems a too narrow view to me. Imagine you want to decomission
> >> the current primary, and instead start to use the logical standby as the
> >> primary. For that you'd obviously want to replicate the last few
> >> changes. But with the proposed change, that'd be hard to ever achieve.
> >>
> >
> >I think that can still be achieved with the idea being discussed which
> >is to keep allowing sending the WAL for smart shutdown mode but not
> >for other modes(fast, immediate). I don't know whether it is a good
> >idea or not but Kuroda-San has produced a POC patch for it. We can
> >instead choose to improve our docs related to shutdown to explain a
> >bit more about the shutdown's interaction with (logical and physical)
> >replication. As of now, it says: (“Smart” mode disallows new
> >connections, then waits for all existing clients to disconnect. If the
> >server is in hot standby, recovery and streaming replication will be
> >terminated once all clients have disconnected.)[2]. Here, it is not
> >clear that shutdown will wait for sending and flushing all the WALs.
> >The information for fast and immediate modes is even lesser which
> >makes it more difficult to understand what kind of behavior is
> >expected in those modes.
> >
> >[1] - https://commitfest.postgresql.org/42/3581/
> >[2] - https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/app-pg-ctl.html
> >
>
> Smart shutdown is practically unusable. I don't think it makes sense to tie behavior of walsender to it in any way.
>

So, we have the following options: (a) do nothing for this; (b)
clarify the current behavior in docs. Any suggestions?

--
With Regards,
Amit Kapila.