Re: `pg_ctl init` crashes when run concurrently; semget(2) suspected - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Gavin Panella
Subject Re: `pg_ctl init` crashes when run concurrently; semget(2) suspected
Date
Msg-id CALL7chntPvKFBN0dE8TF7xOhkBbRGF4R=GTOj7vyZJQZwWGKfw@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: `pg_ctl init` crashes when run concurrently; semget(2) suspected  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
Responses Re: `pg_ctl init` crashes when run concurrently; semget(2) suspected
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With that fix applied to REL_17_5 things are working well. Limiting the search sounds like an improvement too.

As an experiment I added a log for when semget in InternalIpcSemaphoreCreate returns -1. When I'm running `pg_ctl init` for this local build concurrently with `pg_ctl init` from PostgreSQL 15 (or another version prior to 17), I saw ~8 logged failures when there was contention. As I increased the concurrency, the maximum number of logged failures looked to be ~8 times concurrency, roughly. For me, then, running `pg_ctl init` with a concurrency of 125 would be needed to even begin exceeding the max retries of 1000 – in the worst case. That sounds high enough.

Then I thought: I'm only seeing the log from one of those instances, yet they're all going through the same search for free semaphore sets. That's a few system calls going to waste. Maybe not important in the big picture, but it gave me an idea to left shift nextSemaKey in PGReserveSemaphores, i.e. `nextSemaKey = statbuf.st_ino << 4`, to give each pg_ctl process a few guaranteed uncontested keys (at least, uncontested between themselves). In a small test this eliminated contention for semaphore sets due to concurrency. It is more of an optimisation though, rather than a bug fix.

Gavin

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