Re: `pg_ctl init` crashes when run concurrently; semget(2) suspected
Gavin Panella <gavinpanella@gmail.com>
From: Gavin Panella <gavinpanella@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2025-08-11T22:45:10Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
With that fix applied to REL_17_5 things are working well. Limiting the search sounds like an improvement too. As an experiment I added a log for when semget in InternalIpcSemaphoreCreate returns -1. When I'm running `pg_ctl init` for this local build concurrently with `pg_ctl init` from PostgreSQL 15 (or another version prior to 17), I saw ~8 logged failures when there was contention. As I increased the concurrency, the maximum number of logged failures looked to be ~8 times concurrency, roughly. For me, then, running `pg_ctl init` with a concurrency of 125 would be needed to even begin exceeding the max retries of 1000 – in the worst case. That sounds high enough. Then I thought: I'm only seeing the log from one of those instances, yet they're all going through the same search for free semaphore sets. That's a few system calls going to waste. Maybe not important in the big picture, but it gave me an idea to left shift nextSemaKey in PGReserveSemaphores, i.e. `nextSemaKey = statbuf.st_ino << 4`, to give each pg_ctl process a few guaranteed uncontested keys (at least, uncontested between themselves). In a small test this eliminated contention for semaphore sets due to concurrency. It is more of an optimisation though, rather than a bug fix. Gavin
Commits
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Don't treat EINVAL from semget() as a hard failure.
- 21fddb3d7690 19 (unreleased) landed
- f4c0883448d8 15.15 landed
- e67d5f7baa7d 16.11 landed
- e3b3fa863810 13.23 landed
- b3d6e8b63bc1 14.20 landed
- ab92f0e7f7d7 17.7 landed
- 787cd2b7d5cd 18.0 landed
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Give up on running with NetBSD/OpenBSD's default semaphore settings.
- 810a8b1c8051 18.0 cited