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Re: [HACKERS] PANIC in pg_commit_ts slru after crashes - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Pavan Deolasee
Subject Re: [HACKERS] PANIC in pg_commit_ts slru after crashes
Date
Msg-id CABOikdMdhS4nYX7xHaF+m=P=q_zAJBCYsZ++VN26AZzDRf_xFA@mail.gmail.com
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In response to [HACKERS] PANIC in pg_commit_ts slru after crashes  (Jeff Janes <jeff.janes@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: [HACKERS] PANIC in pg_commit_ts slru after crashes
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On Sat, Apr 15, 2017 at 12:53 AM, Jeff Janes <jeff.janes@gmail.com> wrote:

In the first statement executed after crash recovery, I sometimes get this error:

PANIC:  XX000: could not access status of transaction 207580505
DETAIL:  Could not read from file "pg_commit_ts/1EF0" at offset 131072: Success.
LOCATION:  SlruReportIOError, slru.c:918
STATEMENT:  create temporary table aldjf (x serial)

Other examples:

PANIC:  XX000: could not access status of transaction 3483853232
DETAIL:  Could not read from file "pg_commit_ts/20742" at offset 237568: Success.
LOCATION:  SlruReportIOError, slru.c:918
STATEMENT:  create temporary table aldjf (x serial)

PANIC:  XX000: could not access status of transaction 802552883
DETAIL:  Could not read from file "pg_commit_ts/779E" at offset 114688: Success.
LOCATION:  SlruReportIOError, slru.c:918
STATEMENT:  create temporary table aldjf (x serial)

Based on the errno, I'm assuming the read was successful but returned the wrong number of bytes (which was zero in the case I saw after changing the code to log short reads).

It then goes through recovery again and the problem does not immediately re-occur if you attempt to connect again.  I don't know why the file size would have changed between attempts.


The problem bisects to the commit:

commit 728bd991c3c4389fb39c45dcb0fe57e4a1dccd71
Author: Simon Riggs <simon@2ndQuadrant.com>
Date:   Tue Apr 4 15:56:56 2017 -0400

    Speedup 2PC recovery by skipping two phase state files in normal path


It is not obvious to me how that is relevant.  My test doesn't use prepared transactions (and leaves the guc at zero), and this commit doesn't touch the slru.c.

I'm attaching the test harness.  There is a patch which injects the crash-faults and also allows xid fast-forward, a perl script that runs until crash and assesses the consistency of the post-crash results, and a shell script which sets up the database and then calls the perl script in a loop.  On 8 CPU machine, it takes about an hour for the PANIC to occur.  

The attached script bails out once it sees the PANIC (count.pl line 158) if it didn't do that then it will proceed to connect again and retry, and works fine.  No apparent permanent data corruption.

Any clues on how to investigate this further?

Since all those offsets fall on a page boundary, my guess is that we're somehow failing to handle a new page correctly.

Looking at the patch itself, my feeling is that the following code in src/backend/access/transam/twophase.c might be causing the problem. 

1841 
1842     /* update nextXid if needed */
1843     if (TransactionIdFollowsOrEquals(maxsubxid, ShmemVariableCache->nextXid))
1844     {
1845         LWLockAcquire(XidGenLock, LW_EXCLUSIVE);
1846         ShmemVariableCache->nextXid = maxsubxid;
1847         TransactionIdAdvance(ShmemVariableCache->nextXid);
1848         LWLockRelease(XidGenLock);
1849     }

The function PrescanPreparedTransactions() gets called at the start of the redo recovery and this specific block will get exercised irrespective of whether there are any prepared transactions or not. What I find particularly wrong here is that we are initialising maxsubxid to current value of ShmemVariableCache->nextXid when the function enters, but this block would then again increment ShmemVariableCache->nextXid, when there are no prepared transactions in the system.

I wonder if we should do as in attached patch.

It's not entirely clear to me why only CommitTS fails and not other slrus. One possible reason could be that CommitTS is started before this function gets called whereas CLOG and SUBTRANS get started after the function returns.

Thanks,
Pavan

--
 Pavan Deolasee                   http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
 PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services
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