Re: synchronous_commit = apply - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Thomas Munro
Subject Re: synchronous_commit = apply
Date
Msg-id CAEepm=3hWeffirKH60F=9Gw1UOvdcocvmG1A8S6dkWsCA1OGKw@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: synchronous_commit = apply  (Jaime Casanova <jaime.casanova@2ndquadrant.com>)
Responses Re: synchronous_commit = apply
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[Combining replies to emails from different authors into one message]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 2:21 PM, Jaime Casanova <jaime.casanova@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
On 1 September 2015 at 20:25, Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@enterprisedb.com> wrote: 
> As a quick weekend learning exercise/hack I recently went looking into how
> we could support $SUBJECT.  I discovered we already report the apply
> progress back to the master, and the synchronous waiting facility seemed to
> be all ready to support this.  In fact it seemed a little too easy so
> something tells me it must be wrong!  But anyway, please see the attached
> toy POC patch which does that.

i haven't seen the patch, but probably is as easy as you see it...
IIRC, Simon proposed a patch for this a few years ago and this was
actually contempleted from the beggining in the design of SR.

Ah,  thanks, that certainly explains that.  The source code practically had big arrows pointing to the place to type.  I don't want to step on anyone's toes, so if Simon or anyone else is actively working on this, please let me know, I'll happily cease and desist.


On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 12:35 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 9:25 PM, Thomas Munro
<thomas.munro@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> The next problem is that the master can be waiting quite a long time for a
> reply from the remote walreceiver containing the desired apply LSN: in the
> best case it learns of apply progress from replies to subsequent unrelated
> records (which might be very soon on a busy system but still involves
> waiting for the next transaction's WAL flush), and in the worst case it
> needs to wait for wal_receiver_status_interval (10 seconds by default),
> which makes for a long COMMIT delay.  I was thinking that the solution to
> that may be to teach StartupLOG to signal the walreceiver after it updates
> XLogCtl->lastReplayedEndRecPtr, which should cause walrcv_receive to be
> interrupted and return early, and then walreceiver could send a reply if it
> sees that lastReplayedEndRecPtr has moved.  Maybe that would generate an
> unacceptably high frequency of signals, and maybe there is a better form of
> IPC for this.

Yeah, that could be a problem, as could reply volume. If you've got a
bunch of heap inserts of narrow rows into some table, you don't really
want to send a reply after each one.  That would be a lot of replies,
and nobody can really care about them anyway, at least not for
synchronous_commit purposes.  But what if you only sent a signal when
the just-replayed record was a COMMIT record?  I suppose that could
still be a lot of replies on something like a full-tilt pgbench
workload, but even in that case it would help a lot.

Here's a version that does that.  It's still ugly POC code for now -- the flow control in walreceiver.c probably needs a bit of refactoring so it doesn't have to do the same work in two different places, and it needs some thought about how it balances time spent write wal and sending replies.  But ... it seems to work for simple tests.

I have also attached a test program.  Here are some numbers I measured with master and standby running on my laptop using that program:

synchronous_commit  loops  Time   TPS
off                 10000  0.841s 11890
local               10000  1.869s  5350
remote_write        10000  3.123s  3202
on                  10000  3.085s  3241
apply               10000  3.361s  2975

If you run it with "--check" you can see that the changes are not always immediately visible in anything below "apply" and are always visible in "apply".  (I can't explain why "on" consistently beats "remote_write" on my machine by a small margin...  Maybe something to do with being an assert build.)


On Thu, Sep 3, 2015 at 12:02 AM, Fujii Masao <masao.fujii@gmail.com> wrote:
One idea is to change the standby so that it manages the locations
that the backends in "apply" mode are waiting for in the master,
and to make the startup process wake the walreceiver up whenever
the replay location reaches either of those locations. In this idea,
walreceiver sends back the "apply" location to the master only when
needed.

Hmm.  So maybe commit records could have a flag saying 'someone is waiting for this to commit to apply', and the startup process's apply loop would only bother to signal the walreceiver if it sees that flag.  I will try that.

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