Walreceiver fsyncs excessively

Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com>

From: Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com>
To: PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2011-01-13T12:01:41Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments

While testing Fujii-san's patch to flush any already-written WAL on 
error in walreceiver, I added a debugging elog to XLogWalRcvFlush() to 
print out how far it has written and flushed.

I saw an unexpected pattern while the standby catches up with the master:

LOG:  streaming replication successfully connected to primary
LOG:   flushing flush=0/0 write=0/1E020000
LOG:   flushing flush=0/1E020000 write=0/1E040000
LOG:   flushing flush=0/1E040000 write=0/1E060000
LOG:   flushing flush=0/1E060000 write=0/1E080000
LOG:   flushing flush=0/1E080000 write=0/1E0A0000
LOG:   flushing flush=0/1E0A0000 write=0/1E0C0000
LOG:   flushing flush=0/1E0C0000 write=0/1E0E0000
LOG:   flushing flush=0/1E0E0000 write=0/1E100000
LOG:   flushing flush=0/1E100000 write=0/1E120000
LOG:   flushing flush=0/1E120000 write=0/1E140000

The master sends the WAL at full-speed, but walreceiver always fsyncs it 
in 128 kB chunks. That's excessive, it should be able to read and write 
to disk the whole WAL segment before flushing.

There's a little flaw in the walreceiver logic that tries to read all 
the available WAL before flushing and sleeping. The way libpqrcv_receive 
is written, when it's called with timeout==0 it will not call 
PQconsumeInput. So what happens is that when walreceiver main loop calls 
libpqrcv_receive() in a loop to fetch all WAL that's available without 
blocking, it actually only reads the WAL that's in the libpq receive 
buffer - it will not read the WAL that's in the TCP read buffer.

Attached patch fixes libpqrcv_receive() so that it calls 
PQconsumeInput() before concluding that there's no data available. The 
excessive fsyncing can lead to very bad performance, so this needs to be 
appled to 9.0 too.

-- 
   Heikki Linnakangas
   EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com