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Tom Lane authored
Commit 6d90eaaa added a hibernation mode to the bgwriter to reduce the server's idle-power consumption. However, its interaction with the detailed behavior of BgBufferSync's feedback control loop wasn't very well thought out. That control loop depends primarily on the rate of buffer allocation, not the rate of buffer dirtying, so the hibernation mode has to be designed to operate only when no new buffer allocations are happening. Also, the check for whether the system is effectively idle was not quite right and would fail to detect a constant low level of activity, thus allowing the bgwriter to go into hibernation mode in a way that would let the cycle time vary quite a bit, possibly further confusing the feedback loop. To fix, move the wakeup support from MarkBufferDirty and SetBufferCommitInfoNeedsSave into StrategyGetBuffer, and prevent the bgwriter from entering hibernation mode unless no buffer allocations have happened recently. In addition, fix the delaying logic to remove the problem of possibly not responding to signals promptly, which was basically caused by trying to use the process latch's is_set flag for multiple purposes. I can't prove it but I'm suspicious that that hack was responsible for the intermittent "postmaster does not shut down" failures we've been seeing in the buildfarm lately. In any case it did nothing to improve the readability or robustness of the code. In passing, express the hibernation sleep time as a multiplier on BgWriterDelay, not a constant. I'm not sure whether there's any value in exposing the longer sleep time as an independently configurable setting, but we can at least make it act like this for little extra code.
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