• Michael Paquier's avatar
    Ensure correct minimum consistent point on standbys · c186ba13
    Michael Paquier authored
    Startup process has improved its calculation of incorrect minimum
    consistent point in 8d68ee6, which ensures that all WAL available gets
    replayed when doing crash recovery, and has introduced an incorrect
    calculation of the minimum recovery point for non-startup processes,
    which can cause incorrect page references on a standby when for example
    the background writer flushed a couple of pages on-disk but was not
    updating the control file to let a subsequent crash recovery replay to
    where it should have.
    
    The only case where this has been reported to be a problem is when a
    standby needs to calculate the latest removed xid when replaying a btree
    deletion record, so one would need connections on a standby that happen
    just after recovery has thought it reached a consistent point.  Using a
    background worker which is started after the consistent point is reached
    would be the easiest way to get into problems if it connects to a
    database.  Having clients which attempt to connect periodically could
    also be a problem, but the odds of seeing this problem are much lower.
    
    The fix used is pretty simple, as the idea is to give access to the
    minimum recovery point written in the control file to non-startup
    processes so as they use a reference, while the startup process still
    initializes its own references of the minimum consistent point so as the
    original problem with incorrect page references happening post-promotion
    with a crash do not show up.
    
    Reported-by: Alexander Kukushkin
    Diagnosed-by: Alexander Kukushkin
    Author: Michael Paquier
    Reviewed-by: Kyotaro Horiguchi, Alexander Kukushkin
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/153492341830.1368.3936905691758473953@wrigleys.postgresql.org
    Backpatch-through: 9.3
    c186ba13
xlog.c 389 KB