Re: Exit walsender before confirming remote flush in logical replication - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Tue, Jan 17, 2023 at 2:41 PM Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Let me try to summarize the discussion till now. The problem we are
> trying to solve here is to allow a shutdown to complete when walsender
> is not able to send the entire WAL. Currently, in such cases, the
> shutdown fails. As per our current understanding, this can happen when
> (a) walreceiver/walapply process is stuck (not able to receive more
> WAL) due to locks or some other reason; (b) a long time delay has been
> configured to apply the WAL (we don't yet have such a feature for
> logical replication but the discussion for same is in progress).
>
> Both reasons mostly apply to logical replication because there is no
> separate walreceiver process whose job is to just flush the WAL. In
> logical replication, the process that receives the WAL also applies
> it. So, while applying it can stuck for a long time waiting for some
> heavy-weight lock to be released by some other long-running
> transaction by the backend.
>

While checking the commits and email discussions in this area, I came
across the email [1] from Michael where something similar seems to
have been discussed. Basically, whether the early shutdown of
walsender can prevent a switchover between publisher and subscriber
but that part was never clearly answered in that email chain. It might
be worth reading the entire discussion [2]. That discussion finally
lead to the following commit:

commit c6c333436491a292d56044ed6e167e2bdee015a2
Author: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Date:   Mon Jun 5 18:53:41 2017 -0700

    Prevent possibility of panics during shutdown checkpoint.

    When the checkpointer writes the shutdown checkpoint, it checks
    afterwards whether any WAL has been written since it started and
    throws a PANIC if so.  At that point, only walsenders are still
    active, so one might think this could not happen, but walsenders can
    also generate WAL, for instance in BASE_BACKUP and logical decoding
    related commands (e.g. via hint bits).  So they can trigger this panic
    if such a command is run while the shutdown checkpoint is being
    written.

    To fix this, divide the walsender shutdown into two phases.  First,
    checkpointer, itself triggered by postmaster, sends a
    PROCSIG_WALSND_INIT_STOPPING signal to all walsenders.  If the backend
    is idle or runs an SQL query this causes the backend to shutdown, if
    logical replication is in progress all existing WAL records are
    processed followed by a shutdown.
...
...

Here, as mentioned in the commit, we are trying to ensure that before
checkpoint writes its shutdown WAL record, we ensure that "if logical
replication is in progress all existing WAL records are processed
followed by a shutdown.". I think even before this commit, we try to
send the entire WAL before shutdown but not completely sure. There was
no discussion on what happens if the logical walreceiver/walapply
process is waiting on some heavy-weight lock and the network socket
buffer is full due to which walsender is not able to process its WAL.
Is it okay for shutdown to fail in such a case as it is happening now,
or shall we somehow detect that and shut down the walsender, or we
just allow logical walsender to always exit immediately as soon as the
shutdown signal came?

Note: I have added some of the people involved in the previous
thread's [2] discussion in the hope that they can share their
thoughts.

[1] - https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqR3icaA%3DqMv_FuU8YVYH3KUrNMnq_OmCfkzxCHC4fox8w%40mail.gmail.com
[2] - https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAHGQGwEsttg9P9LOOavoc9d6VB1zVmYgfBk%3DLjsk-UL9cEf-eA%40mail.gmail.com

-- 
With Regards,
Amit Kapila.