Re: odd buildfarm failure - "pg_ctl: control file appears to be corrupt"

Hi Thomas,

On 7/26/23 06:06, Thomas Munro wrote:
> While chatting to Robert and Andres about all this, a new idea came
> up.  Or, rather, one of the first ideas that was initially rejected,
> now resurrected to try out a suggestion of Andres’s on how to
> de-pessimise it.  Unfortunately, it also suffers from Windows-specific
> problems that I originally mentioned at the top of this thread but
> had since repressed.  Arrrghgh.
> 
> First, the good news:
> 
> We could write out a whole new control file, and durable_rename() it
> into place.  We don’t want to do that in general, because we don’t
> want to slow down UpdateMinRecoveryPoint().  The new concept is to do
> that only if a backup is in progress.  That requires a bit of
> interlocking with backup start/stop (ie when runningBackups is
> changing in shmem, we don’t want to overlap with UpdateControlFile()'s
> decision on how to do it).  Here is a patch to try that out.  No more
> weasel wording needed for the docs; basebackup and low-level file
> system backup should always see an atomic control file (and
> occasionally also copy a harmless pg_control.tmp file).  Then we only
> need the gross retry-until-stable hack for front-end programs.

I like the approach in these patches better than the last patch set. My 
only concern would be possible performance regression on standbys (when 
doing backup from standby) since pg_control can be written very 
frequently to update min recovery point.

I've made a first pass through the patches and they look generally 
reasonable (and back patch-able).

One thing:

+ sendFileWithContent(sink, XLOG_CONTROL_FILE,
+                     (char *) control_file, sizeof(*control_file),
+                     &manifest);

I wonder if we should pad pg_control out to 8k so it remains the same 
size as now? Postgres doesn't care, but might look odd to users, and is 
arguably a change in behavior that should not be back patched.

> And the bad news:

Provided we can reasonably address the Windows issues this seems to be 
the way to go.

Regards,
-David