Re: BUG #15293: Stored Procedure Triggered by Logical Replication is Unable to use Notification Events

Thank you Tom for your review.

On Mon, Sep 6, 2021 at 9:27 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> Artur Zakirov <artur.zakirov@adjust.com> writes:
> > I attached the patch which fixes it in a different way. It calls
> > SignalBackends() in AtCommit_Notify(). It is possible to call SignalBackends()
> > outside of ProcessCompletedNotifies() after the commit
> > 51004c7172b5c35afac050f4d5849839a06e8d3b, which removes necessity of checking
> > of SignalBackends()'s result.
>
> Hm.  So that forecloses back-patching this to earlier than v13.
> On the other hand, given that we've been ignoring the bug for awhile,
> maybe a fix that only works in v13+ is good enough.  (Or maybe by now
> it'd be safe to back-patch the v13-era async.c changes?  Don't really
> want to, though.)

I think it would be better to back-patch the fix to older versions
than v13. But considering that the new patch renames
ProcessCompletedNotifies(), it can break existing applications which
use background workers and NOTIFY. Users can be upset with the change,
since they don't face the original bug, they just call
ProcessCompletedNotifies() manually.

In that case v13+ fix can be good enough. But users who use logical
replication and have the NOTIFY bug will have to update to the new
version of Postgres.

> The larger problem with this patch is exactly what Andres said: if
> a replication worker or other background process is sending notifies,
> but no normal backend is listening, then nothing will ever call
> asyncQueueAdvanceTail() so the message queue will bloat until it
> overflows and things start failing.  That's not OK.  Perhaps it
> could be fixed by moving the "if (backendTryAdvanceTail)" stanza
> into AtCommit_Notify.  That's not ideal, because really it's best
> to not do that till after we've read our own notifies, but it might
> be close enough.  At that point ProcessCompletedNotifies's only
> responsibility would be to call asyncQueueReadAllNotifications,
> which would allow some simplifications.

Agree, I moved asyncQueueAdvanceTail() to AtCommit_Notify().

> * I think that it's safe to move these actions to AtCommit_Notify,
> given where that is called in the CommitTransaction sequence, but
> there is nothing in xact.c suggesting that that call is in any way
> ordering-critical (because today, it isn't).  I think we need some
> comments there to prevent somebody from breaking this in future.
> Maybe about like

I added comments before and after AtCommit_Notify().

> * You need to spend more effort on the comments in async.c too.  Some
> of these changes are wrong plus there are places that should be changed
> and weren't.  Also, postgres.c's comment about ProcessCompletedNotifies
> is invalidated by this patch.

I fixed these parts. I removed some excessive changes and also fixed
the comment in postgres.c.

> * There is some verbiage about NOTIFY in bgworker.sgml, which looks
> like it may be wrong now, and it certainly will be wrong after this
> patch.  We don't want to be encouraging bgworkers to call
> ProcessCompletedNotifies.  Maybe we should rename it, to force
> the issue?

I removed this part of documentation and renamed the function to
ProcessBackendNotifies(). It process only self-notifies now, but
ProcessBackendNotifies is good enough to express that the function
processes notifies of the backend.

I also renamed backendTryAdvanceTail to tryAdvanceTail, since it is
used not only by backends.

-- 
Artur