Re: Why is src/test/modules/committs/t/002_standby.pl flaky?

Hi,

On 2022-02-12 11:47:20 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Alexander Lakhin <exclusion@gmail.com> writes:
> > 11.02.2022 05:22, Andres Freund wrote:
> >> Over in another thread I made some wild unsubstantiated guesses that the
> >> windows issues could have been made much more likely by a somewhat odd bit of
> >> code in PQisBusy():
> >> https://postgr.es/m/1959196.1644544971%40sss.pgh.pa.us
> >> Alexander, any chance you'd try if that changes the likelihood of the problem
> >> occurring, without any other fixes / reverts applied?
> 
> > Unfortunately I haven't seen an improvement for the test in question.

Thanks for testing!


> Yeah, that's what I expected, sadly.  While I think this PQisBusy behavior
> is definitely a bug, it will not lead to an infinite loop, just to write
> failures being reported in a less convenient fashion than intended.

FWIW, I didn't think it'd end up looping indefinitely, but that there's a
chance it could end up waiting indefinitely. The WaitLatchOrSocket() doesn't
have a timeout, and if I understand the windows FD_CLOSE stuff correctly,
you're not guaranteed to get an event if you do WaitForMultipleObjects if
FD_CLOSE was already consumed and if there isn't any data to read.


ISTM that it's not a great idea for libpqrcv_receive() to do blocking IO at
all. The caller expects it to not block...


> I wonder whether it would help to put a PQconsumeInput call *before*
> the PQisBusy loop, so that any pre-existing EOF condition will be
> detected.  If you don't like duplicating code, we could restructure
> the loop as

That does look a bit saner. Even leaving EOF and windows issues aside, it
seems weird to do a WaitLatchOrSocket() without having tried to read more
data.

Greetings,

Andres Freund