Re: Memory leak in XLOG reader facility when decoding records (caused by WAL refactoring) - Mailing list pgsql-bugs

On 07/27/2015 04:40 AM, Michael Paquier wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 27, 2015 at 12:32 AM, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
>> On 2015-07-23 22:50:12 +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
>>>
>>> While running valgring on pg_rewind, I have noticed that each new call
>>> to XLogReadRecord leaks XLogReaderState->main_data and
>>> XLogReaderState->blocks[block_id].data because each one of them is
>>> palloc'd to store respectively the main data of the record and the
>>> data attached to each block. I think that the most correct fix to
>>> prevent the leak is to free those pointers when calling ResetDecoder()
>>> which is used to reset a reader state between two records.
>>
>> I don't think that'd be a good fix. Isn't the idea here that we only
>> allocate new buffers when the previous one is too small? Your fix will
>> greatly increase the memory management overhead.
>
> OK.
>
>>> ==46805== 154 bytes in 1 blocks are definitely lost in loss record 103
> of 167
>>> ==46805==    at 0x6B1B: malloc (in
>>>
> /usr/local/Cellar/valgrind/3.10.1/lib/valgrind/vgpreload_memcheck-amd64-darwin.so)
>>> ==46805==    by 0x10000DB2D: pg_malloc_internal (fe_memutils.c:30)
>>> ==46805==    by 0x10000DE79: palloc (fe_memutils.c:118)
>>> ==46805==    by 0x1000052A0: DecodeXLogRecord (xlogreader.c:1203)
>>> ==46805==    by 0x100003AA9: XLogReadRecord (xlogreader.c:461)
>>> ==46805==    by 0x1000022F0: extractPageMap (parsexlog.c:78)
>>> ==46805==    by 0x10000188C: main (pg_rewind.c:280)
>>
>> Uh. This is the leak?
>>          if (state->main_data_len > 0)
>>          {
>>                  if (!state->main_data || state->main_data_len >
> state->main_data_bufsz)
>>                  {
>>                          if (state->main_data)g
>>                                  pfree(state->main_data);
>>                          state->main_data_bufsz = state->main_data_len;
>>                          state->main_data =
> palloc(state->main_data_bufsz); <--- here
>>                  }
>>                  memcpy(state->main_data, ptr, state->main_data_len);
>>                  ptr += state->main_data_len;
>>          }
>>
>> Where/When are we leaking memory here? The previously used memory is
>> freed before we allocate a larger buffer.
>
> Yep, it is here, and it is not related to the calls of XLogReadRecord
> actually, that's a problem in XLogReaderFree that relies on max_block_id,
> which gets reinitialized to -1 between two records in ResetDecoder, instead
> of XLR_MAX_BLOCK_ID to clean up the data blocks when freeing the XLOG
> reader (note: looking at memory leaks at night can lead to incorrect
> conclusions). So for example if a first record uses some data blocks and
> allocates buffers for some data, and then a second record uses no data
> blocks, we'll leak. So that's less critical than I though as the couple
> XLofReaderAllocate/XLogReaderFree is called only once in StartupXLOG, still
> that's a leak.
>
> Attached is a self-contained script able to show the problem if anybody
> wants to check by himself (the other leaks related to pg_rewind are
> addressed in another thread), and a patch that takes care of it.

Thanks, committed. The leak was not actually in the "main_data"
handling, as quoted in the above snippet, but in the per-block buffers.

- Heikki