Thread: pg_rewind WAL segments deletion pitfall

In the first place, this is not a bug. (At least doesn't seem.)
If you mean to propose behavioral changes, -hackers is the place.

At Tue, 23 Aug 2022 17:46:30 +0200, Полина Бунгина <bungina@gmail.com> wrote in 
>    4. We are not lucky enough, the new and the old primary’s timelines
>    diverged, we need to run pg_rewind
>    5. We are even less lucky: the old primary still has some WAL segments
>    with .ready signal files that were generated before the point of divergence
>    and were not archived.

That dones't harm pg_rewind at all.

>    6. The promoted primary runs for some time and recycles the old WAL
>    segments.
>    7. We revive the old primary and try to rewind it
>    8. When pg_rewind finished successfully, we see that the WAL segments
>    with .ready files are removed, because they were already absent on the
>    promoted replica. We end up in a situation where we completely lose some
>    WAL segments, even though we had a clear sign that they were not
>    archived and
>    more importantly, pg_rewind read these segments while collecting
>    information about the data blocks.

In terms of syncing the old primary to the new primary, no data has
been lost. The "lost" segments are anyway unusable for the new primary
since they no longer compatible with it.  How do you intended to use
the WAL files for the incompatible cluster?

>    9. The old primary fails to start because of the missing WAL segments
>    (more strictly, the records between the last common checkpoint and the
>    point of divergence) with the following log record: "ERROR:  requested WAL
>    segment 000000020004D20200000096 has already been removed"

That means that the tail end of the rewound old primary has been lost
on the new primary's pg_wal.  In that case, you need to somehow
copy-in the archived WAL files on the new primary. You can just do
that or you can set up restore_command properly.
> Thus, my thoughts are: why can’t pg_rewind be a little bit wiser in terms
> of creating filemap for WALs? Can it preserve the WAL segments that contain
> those potentially lost records (> the last common checkpoint and  < the
> point of divergence) on the target? (see the patch attached)

Since they are not really needed once rewind completes.

> If I am missing something however, please correct me or explain why it is
> not possible to implement this straightforward solution.

Maybe you're mistaking the operation.  If I understand the situation
correctly, I think the following steps replays your "issue" and then
resolve that.


# killall -9 postgres
# rm -r oldprim newprim oldarch newarch oldprim.log newprim.log
mkdir newarch oldarch
initdb -k -D oldprim
echo "archive_mode = 'always'">> oldprim/postgresql.conf
echo "archive_command = 'cp %p `pwd`/oldarch/%f'">> oldprim/postgresql.conf
pg_ctl -D oldprim -o '-p 5432' -l oldprim.log start
psql -p 5432 -c 'create table t(a int)'
pg_basebackup -D newprim -p 5432
echo "primary_conninfo='host=/tmp port=5432'">> oldprim/postgresql.conf
echo "archive_command = 'cp %p `pwd`/newarch/%f'">> newprim/postgresql.conf
touch newprim/standby.signal
pg_ctl -D newprim -o '-p 5433' -l newprim.log start
pg_ctl -D newprim promote
for i in $(seq 1 4); do psql -p 5432 -c 'insert into t values(0); select pg_switch_wal();'; done
psql -p 5432 -c 'checkpoint'
pg_ctl -D oldprim stop
echo "restore_command = 'cp `pwd`/oldarch/%f %p'">> oldprim/postgresql.conf
# pg_rewind -D oldprim --source-server='port=5433' # fails
pg_rewind -D oldprim --source-server='port=5433' -c
for i in $(seq 1 4); do psql -p 5433 -c 'insert into t values(0); select pg_switch_wal();'; done
psql -p 5433 -c 'checkpoint'
echo "primary_conninfo='host=/tmp port=5433'">> oldprim/postgresql.conf
touch oldprim/standby.signal

postgres -D oldprim

>  FATAL:  could not receive data from WAL stream: ERROR:  requested WAL segment 000000020000000000000003 has already
beenremoved
 

[ctrl-C]
======

Now that the old primary requires older WAL files *on the new
primary*.  Here, define restore command to do that.

=====
echo "restore_command='cp `pwd`/newarch/%f %p'">> oldprim/postgresql.conf
postgres -D oldprim
=====

Now the old primary run as the standby of the new primary.

> LOG:  restored log file "000000020000000000000006" from archive
> LOG:  consistent recovery state reached at 0/30020B0
> LOG:  database system is ready to accept read-only connections

regards.

-- 
Kyotaro Horiguchi
NTT Open Source Software Center