Re: [bug fix] Cascaded standby cannot start after a clean shutdown

On Fri, Feb 23, 2018 at 11:02:19PM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> Tsunakawa-san has proposed upthread to fix the problem by zero-ing the
> page read in the WAL receiver. While I agree that zeroing the page is
> the way to go, doing so in the WAL receiver does not take care of
> problems with the frontends. I don't have the time to test that yet as
> it is late here, but based on my code lookups tweaking
> ReadPageInternal() so as the page is zero'ed correctly should do it for
> all the cases. This way, the checks happening after a page read would
> fail because of the zero'ed fields consistently instead of the garbage
> accumulated.

I have been playing more with that this morning, and trying to tweak the
XLOG reader so as the fetched page is zeroed where necessary does not
help much. XLogReaderState->EndRecPtr is updated once the last record
is set so it is possible to use it and zero the rest of the page which
would prevent a lookup. But this is actually not wise for performance:
- The data after EndRecPtr could be perfectly valid, so you could zero
data which could be reused later.
- It is necessary to drop the quick-exit checks in PageReadInternal.

The WAL receiver approach also has a drawback. If WAL is streamed at
full speed, then the primary sends data with a maximum of 6 WAL pages.
When beginning streaming with a new segment, then the WAL sent stops at
page boundary. But if you stop once in the middle of a page then you
need to zero-fill the page until the current segment is finished
streaming. So if the workload generates spiky WAL then the WAL receiver
can would a lot of extra lseek() calls with the patch applied, while all
the writes would be sequential on HEAD, so that's not performant-wise
IMO.

Another idea I am thinking about would be to zero-fill the segments
when recycled instead of being just renamed when doing
InstallXLogFileSegment(). This would also have the advantage of making
the segments ahead more compressible, which is a gain for custom
backups, and the WAL receiver does not need any tweaks as it would write
the data on a clean file. Zero-filling the segments is done only when a
new segment is created (see XLogFileInit).

Each approach has its own cost. Thoughts?
--
Michael