• Tom Lane's avatar
    Make checkpoint requests more robust. · 0dfe3d0e
    Tom Lane authored
    Commit 6f6a6d8b introduced a delay of up to 2 seconds if we're trying
    to request a checkpoint but the checkpointer hasn't started yet (or,
    much less likely, our kill() call fails).  However buildfarm experience
    shows that that's not quite enough for slow or heavily-loaded machines.
    There's no good reason to assume that the checkpointer won't start
    eventually, so we may as well make the timeout much longer, say 60 sec.
    
    However, if the caller didn't say CHECKPOINT_WAIT, it seems like a bad
    idea to be waiting at all, much less for as long as 60 sec.  We can
    remove the need for that, and make this whole thing more robust, by
    adjusting the code so that the existence of a pending checkpoint
    request is clear from the contents of shared memory, and making sure
    that the checkpointer process will notice it at startup even if it did
    not get a signal.  In this way there's no need for a non-CHECKPOINT_WAIT
    call to wait at all; if it can't send the signal, it can nonetheless
    assume that the checkpointer will eventually service the request.
    
    A potential downside of this change is that "kill -INT" on the checkpointer
    process is no longer enough to trigger a checkpoint, should anyone be
    relying on something so hacky.  But there's no obvious reason to do it
    like that rather than issuing a plain old CHECKPOINT command, so we'll
    assume that nobody is.  There doesn't seem to be a way to preserve this
    undocumented quasi-feature without introducing race conditions.
    
    Since a principal reason for messing with this is to prevent intermittent
    buildfarm failures, back-patch to all supported branches.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/27830.1552752475@sss.pgh.pa.us
    0dfe3d0e
checkpointer.c 42.1 KB