Re: pg_basebackup blocking all queries with horrible performance

On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 2:37 AM, Lonni J Friedman <netllama(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 8, 2012 at 7:29 PM, Fujii Masao <masao(dot)fujii(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 4:30 AM, Lonni J Friedman <netllama(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 11:04 PM, Craig Ringer <ringerc(at)ringerc(dot)id(dot)au> wrote:
>>>> On 06/08/2012 09:01 AM, Lonni J Friedman wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, Jun 7, 2012 at 5:07 PM, Jerry Sievers<gsievers19(at)comcast(dot)net>
>>>>>  wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> You might try stopping pg_basebackup in place with SIGSTOP and check
>>>>>>
>>>>>> if problem goes away.  SIGCONT and you should  start having
>>>>>> sluggishness again.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If verified, then any sort of throttling mechanism should work.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm certain that the problem is triggered only when pg_basebackup is
>>>>> running.  Its very predictable, and goes away as soon as pg_basebackup
>>>>> finishes running.  What do you mean by a throttling mechanism?
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Sure, it only happens when pg_basebackup is running. But if you *pause*
>>>> pg_basebackup, so it's still running but not currently doing work, does the
>>>> problem go away? Does it come back when you unpause pg_basebackup? That's
>>>> what Jerry was telling you to try.
>>>>
>>>> If the problem goes away when you pause pg_basebackup and comes back when
>>>> you unpause it, it's probably a system load problem.
>>>>
>>>> If it doesn't go away, it's more likely to be a locking issue or something
>>>> _other_ than simple load.
>>>>
>>>> SIGSTOP ("kill -STOP") pauses a process, and SIGCONT ("kill -CONT") resumes
>>>> it, so on Linux you can use these to try and find out. When you SIGSTOP
>>>> pg_basebackup then the postgres backend associated with it should block
>>>> shortly afterwards as its buffers fill up and it can't send more data, so
>>>> the load should come off the server.
>>>>
>>>> A "throttling mechanism" refers to anything that limits the rate or speed of
>>>> a thing. In this case, what you want to do if your problem is system
>>>> overload is to limit the speed at which pg_basebackup does its work so other
>>>> things can still get work done. In other words you want to throttle it.
>>>> Typical throttling mechanisms include the "ionice" and "renice" commands to
>>>> change I/O and CPU priority, respectively.
>>>>
>>>> Note that you may need to change the priority of the *backend* that
>>>> pg_basebackup is using, not necessarily the pg_basebackup command its self.
>>>> I haven't done enough with Pg's replication to know how that works, so
>>>> someone else will have to fill that bit in.
>>>
>>> Thanks for your reply.  I've confirmed that issuing a SIGSTOP does
>>> eliminate the thrashing, and issuing a SIGCONT resumes the thrash.
>>>
>>> I've looked at iostat output both before & during pg_basebackup runs,
>>> and I'm not seeing any indication that the problem is due to disk IO
>>> bottlenecks.  The numbers don't vary very much at all between the good
>>> & bad times.  This is typical when pg_basebackup is running:
>>> ########
>>> Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rMB/s    wMB/s
>>> avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
>>> md0
>>>                  0.00     0.00   67.76   68.62     4.42     1.46
>>> 88.34     0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   0.00   0.00
>>> ########
>>>
>>> and this is when the system is ok:
>>> ########
>>> Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s    rMB/s    wMB/s
>>> avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await r_await w_await  svctm  %util
>>> md0
>>>                  0.00     0.00   68.04   68.56     4.44     1.46
>>> 88.39     0.00    0.00    0.00    0.00   0.00   0.00
>>> ########
>>>
>>>
>>> I looked at vmstat output, but nothing is jumping out at me as being
>>> dramatically different when pg_basebackup is running.  swap in and
>>> swap out are zero 100% of the time for the good & bad perf cases.  I
>>> can post example output if someone is interested, or if there's
>>> something specific that I should be looking at as a potential problem,
>>> let me know.
>>
>> Did you set synchronous_standby_names to '*'? If so, the problem you
>> encountered can happen.
>>
>> When synchronous_standby_names is '*', you cannot control which
>> standbys take a role of synchronous standby. The standby which you
>> expect to run as asynchronous one might be synchronous one. So
>> my guess is that at first one of your three standbys was running as
>> synchronous standby, and all queries were executed normally. But
>> when you started pg_basebackup, pg_basebackup unexpectedly
>> got the role of synchronous standby from another standby. Since
>> pg_basebackup doesn't send the information about replication
>> progress back to the master, all queries (more precisely, transaction
>> commit) got stuck, and kept waiting for the reply from synchronous
>> standby.
>>
>> You can avoid this problem by setting synchronous_standby_names
>> to the names of your standbys instead of '*'.
>
> I don't have synchronous_standby_names set at all.  I'm only doing
> asynchronous replication.

Hmm... I have no idea about what happened on your environment, for now.
Could you show me the self-contained test case?

Regards,

--
Fujii Masao