Re: select_parallel test failure: gather sometimes losing tuples (maybe during rescans)?

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>

From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
To: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@enterprisedb.com>
Cc: Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2018-03-05T20:17:16Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 4:46 PM, Thomas Munro
<thomas.munro@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> Thanks!  Here are a couple of patches.  I'm not sure which I prefer.
> The "pessimistic" one looks simpler and is probably the way to go, but
> the "optimistic" one avoids doing an extra read until it has actually
> run out of data and seen mq_detached == true.
>
> I realised that the pg_write_barrier() added to
> shm_mq_detach_internal() from the earlier demonstration/hack patch was
> not needed... I had a notion that SpinLockAcquire() might not include
> a strong enough barrier (unlike SpinLockRelease()), but after reading
> s_lock.h I think it's not needed (since you get either TAS() or a
> syscall-based slow path, both expected to include a full fence).  I
> haven't personally tested this on a weak memory order system.

The optimistic approach seems a little bit less likely to slow this
down on systems where barriers are expensive, so I committed that one.
Thanks for debugging this; I hope this fixes it, but I guess we'll
see.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company


Commits

  1. shm_mq: Fix detach race condition.

  2. shm_mq: Have the receiver set the sender's less frequently.

  3. shm_mq: Reduce spinlock usage.

  4. Report an ERROR if a parallel worker fails to start properly.