Re: Assertion failure in SnapBuildInitialSnapshot()

Masahiko Sawada <sawada.mshk@gmail.com>

From: Masahiko Sawada <sawada.mshk@gmail.com>
To: Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com>
Cc: "Zhijie Hou (Fujitsu)" <houzj.fnst@fujitsu.com>, Pradeep Kumar <spradeepkumar29@gmail.com>, Alexander Lakhin <exclusion@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, vignesh C <vignesh21@gmail.com>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, "Hayato Kuroda (Fujitsu)" <kuroda.hayato@fujitsu.com>, Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2025-11-06T18:36:12Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Thu, Nov 6, 2025 at 2:36 AM Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Nov 6, 2025 at 12:03 PM Zhijie Hou (Fujitsu)
> <houzj.fnst@fujitsu.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thursday, October 30, 2025 7:01 AM Masahiko Sawada <sawada.mshk@gmail.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > Also, I think it's worth considering the idea Robert shared before[1]:
> > >
> > > ---
> > > But what about just surgically preventing that?
> > > ProcArraySetReplicationSlotXmin() could refuse to retreat the values,
> > > perhaps? If it computes an older value than what's there, it just does nothing?
> > > ---
> > >
> > > We did a similar fix for confirmed_flush LSN by commit ad5eaf390c582, and it
> > > sounds reasonable to me that ProcArraySetReplicationSlotXmin() refuses to
> > > retreat the values.
> >
> > I reviewed the thread and think that we could not straightforwardly apply a
> > similar strategy to prevent the retreat of xmin/catalog_xmin here. This is
> > because we maintain a central value
> > (replication_slot_xmin/replication_slot_catalog_xmin) in
> > ProcArraySetReplicationSlotXmin, where the value is expected to decrease when
> > certain slots are dropped or invalidated.
> >
>
> Good point. This can happen when the last slot is invalidated or dropped.

After the last slot is invalidated or dropped, both slot_xmin and
slot_catalog_xmin values are set InvalidTransactionId. Then in this
case, these values are ignored when computing the oldest safe decoding
XID in GetOldestSafeDecodingTransactionId(), no? Or do you mean that
there is a case where slot_xmin and slot_catalog_xmin retreat to a
valid XID?

Regards,

-- 
Masahiko Sawada
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com



Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →
  1. Fix a race condition in updating procArray->replication_slot_xmin.

  2. Don't retreat slot's confirmed_flush LSN.

  3. Add additional checks while creating the initial decoding snapshot.