Re: Excessive PostmasterIsAlive calls slow down WAL redo

On Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 11:39 PM, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi> wrote:
> The 'postmaster_possibly_dead' flag is not reset anywhere. So if a process
> receives a spurious death signal, even though postmaster is still alive,
> PostmasterIsAlive() will continue to use the slow path.

+1

> postmaster_possibly_dead needs to be marked as 'volatile', no?

+1

> The autoconf check for PR_SET_PDEATHSIG seems slightly misplaced. And I
> think we can simplify it with AC_CHECK_HEADER(). I'd also like to avoid
> adding code to c.h for this, that seems too global.

+1, much nicer, thanks.

> After some kibitzing, I ended up with the attached. It fixes the
> postmaster_possible_dead issues mentioned above, and moves around the
> autoconf and #ifdef logic a bit to make it a bit nicer, at least in my
> opinion.

Thanks, that looks good to me.  I added your name as co-author and
pushed to master.

I also made a couple of minor cosmetic changes in
PostmasterDeathSignalInit() to make the follow-up patch prettier (#if
defined() instead of #ifdef, and a signum variable because I later
need its address).

> I don't have a FreeBSD machine at hand, so I didn't try fixing that
> patch.

I updated the FreeBSD version to use the header test approach you
showed, and pushed that too.  FWIW the build farm has some FreeBSD
animals with and without PROC_PDEATHSIG_CTL.

I suppose it's possibly that we might want to reconsider the choice of
signal in the future (SIGINFO or SIGPWR).

(Random archeological note: TIL that Linux stole <sys/prctl.h> from
Irix (RIP), but it had PR_TERMCHILD instead of PR_SET_PRDEATHSIG.)

-- 
Thomas Munro
http://www.enterprisedb.com