Re: BUG: Former primary node might stuck when started as a standby

Alexander Law <exclusion@gmail.com>

From: Alexander Lakhin <exclusion@gmail.com>
To: "Hayato Kuroda (Fujitsu)" <kuroda.hayato@fujitsu.com>
Cc: pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Aleksander Alekseev <aleksander@timescale.com>
Date: 2026-02-20T02:00:00Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments

Dear Kuroda-san,

19.02.2026 05:50, Hayato Kuroda (Fujitsu) wrote:
> Dear Alexander,
>
>> Unfortunately, the testing procedure I shared above still produces failures
>> with the patched 009_twophase.pl.
> Hmm, I ran the test for hours, but I could nor reproduce the failure. But let me analyze
> based on your log.

Please look at the attached self-contained script. It works for me (failed
on iterations 6, 12, 2 right now, on my workstation with Ryzen 7900X) --
probably you could adjust number of parallel jobs to reproduce it on your
hardware.

> I have few experience to see the wal_debug output, but background writer seems to
> generate the RUNNING_XACTS record. It's different from my expectation. To confirm,
> did you really enable the injection point? For now 009_twophase can work without
> the `-Dinjection_points=true` but it should be set to avoid random failures.

I think it failed before the injection was set. My log contains:
2026-02-17 07:06:44.313 EET client backend[754908] 009_twophase.pl STATEMENT:  PREPARE TRANSACTION 'xact_009_10';
2026-02-17 07:06:44.313 EET client backend[754908] 009_twophase.pl LOG:  xlog flush request 0/030227F8; write 
0/00000000; flush 0/00000000
2026-02-17 07:06:44.313 EET client backend[754908] 009_twophase.pl STATEMENT:  PREPARE TRANSACTION 'xact_009_10';
2026-02-17 07:06:44.313 EET background writer[754333] LOG:  INSERT @ 0/03022838:  - Standby/RUNNING_XACTS: nextXid 791 
latestCompletedXid 788 oldestRunningXid 789; 1 xacts: 789; 1 subxacts: 790

As far as I can see, it corresponds to this place in the test:
      SAVEPOINT s1;
      INSERT INTO t_009_tbl VALUES (22, 'issued to ${cur_primary_name}');
      PREPARE TRANSACTION 'xact_009_10';");
+$cur_primary->wait_for_replay_catchup($cur_standby);
  $cur_primary->teardown_node;
  $cur_standby->promote;

And as we found out before, wait_for_replay_catchup() before teardown
doesn't help... I can't say for sure, but from my experiments, the test
didn't fail with $cur_primary->stop instead of $cur_primary->teardown_node.

Best regards,
Alexander

Commits

  1. Fix rare instability in recovery TAP test 004_timeline_switch

  2. Fix rare instability in recovery TAP test 009_twophase