pg_upgrade can result in early wraparound on databases with hightransaction load - Mailing list pgsql-general

Hello,

This week I upgraded one of my large(2.8TB), high-volume databases from 9 to 11. The upgrade itself went fine. About two days later, we unexpectedly hit transaction ID wraparound. What was perplexing about this was that the age of our oldest `datfrozenxid` was only 1.2 billion - far away from where I'd expect a wraparound. Curiously, the wraparound error referred to a mysterious database of `OID 0`:

UPDATE ERROR:  database is not accepting commands to avoid wraparound data loss in database with OID 0

We were able to recover after a few hours by greatly speeding up our vacuum on our largest table.

In a followup investigation I uncovered the reason we hit the wraparound so early, and also the cause of the mysterious OID 0 message. When pg_upgrade executes, it calls pg_resetwal to set the next transaction ID. Within pg_resetwal is the following code: https://github.com/postgres/postgres/blob/6cd404b344f7e27f4d64555bb133f18a758fe851/src/bin/pg_resetwal/pg_resetwal.c#L440-L450

This sets the controldata to have a fake database (OID 0) on the brink of transaction wraparound. Specifically, after pg_upgrade is ran, wraparound will occur within around 140 million transactions (provided the autovacuum doesn't finish first). I confirmed by analyzing our controldata before and after the upgrade that this was the cause of our early wraparound.

Given the size and heavy volume of our database, we tend to complete a vacuum in the time it takes around 250 million transactions to execute. With our tunings this tends to be rather safe and we stay well away from the wraparound point under normal circumstances.

Unfortunately we had no obvious way of knowing that the upgrade would place our database upon the brink of wraparound. In fact, since this info is only persisted in the controldata, the only way to discover this state to my knowledge would be to inspect the controldata itself. Other standard means of monitoring for wraparound risk involve watching `pg_database` or `pg_class`, which in this case tells us nothing helpful since the fake database present in the controldata is not represented in those stats.

I'd like to suggest that either the pg_upgrade->pg_resetwal behaviour be adjusted, or the pg_upgrade documentation highlight this potential scenario. I'm happy to contribute code and/or documentation pull requests to accomplish this.

Thank you,
Jason Harvey
reddit.com