Horton

Re: BUG #17255: Server crashes in index_delete_sort_cmp() due to race condition with vacuum

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>

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From: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
To: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
Cc: Dmitry Dolgov <9erthalion6@gmail.com>, Alexander Lakhin <exclusion@gmail.com>, Matthias van de Meent <boekewurm+postgres@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL mailing lists <pgsql-bugs@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2021-11-11T02:16:18Z
Lists: pgsql-bugs 
Hi,

On 2021-11-10 17:37:38 -0800, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 10, 2021 at 4:47 PM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> Offhand I'd say that it would be a good idea to add comments over the
> call to vacuum_set_xid_limits() made from vacuumlazy.c.

Hm. To me all of this is more general than vacuum[lazy].c. Or even than
anything heap related.


> You might also move the call to GlobalVisTestFor() out of
> lazy_scan_heap(), so that it gets called right after
> vacuum_set_xid_limits(). That would make the new explanation easier to
> follow, since you are after all explaining the relationship between
> OldestXmin (or the vacuum_set_xid_limits() call itself) and vistest
> (or the GlobalVisTestFor() call itself).
> 
> Why do they have to be called in that order? Or do they? I noticed
> that "make check-world" won't break if you switch the order.

We need pruning to be at least as aggressive as relfrozenxid. If we did it the
other way round, we couldn't guarantee that.

I think we should work towards not actually using a statically determined
relfrozenxid. We cause a lot of unnecessary re-vacuuming by using a static
cutoff - instead we should check what the actually oldest xid in the table is
and set relfrozenxid to that.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

Commits

  1. vacuumlazy.c: Standardize rel_pages terminology.

  2. vacuumlazy.c: document vistest and OldestXmin.

  3. heap pruning: Only call BufferGetBlockNumber() once.

  4. Fix possible HOT corruption when RECENTLY_DEAD changes to DEAD while pruning.

  5. Assert redirect pointers are sensible after heap_page_prune().

  6. Remove tupgone special case from vacuumlazy.c.

  7. Recycle nbtree pages deleted during same VACUUM.

  8. snapshot scalability: Don't compute global horizons while building snapshots.

  9. Refactor heap_page_prune so that instead of changing item states on-the-fly,