Another reason why the recovery tests take a long time

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: pgsql-hackers(at)postgreSQL(dot)org
Subject: Another reason why the recovery tests take a long time
Date: 2017-06-26 16:32:00
Message-ID: 21344.1498494720@sss.pgh.pa.us
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I've found another edge-case bug through investigation of unexpectedly
slow recovery test runs. It goes like this:

* While streaming from master to slave, test script shuts down master
while slave is left running. We soon restart the master, but meanwhile:

* slave's walreceiver process fails, reporting

2017-06-26 16:06:50.209 UTC [13209] LOG: replication terminated by primary server
2017-06-26 16:06:50.209 UTC [13209] DETAIL: End of WAL reached on timeline 1 at 0/3000098.
2017-06-26 16:06:50.209 UTC [13209] FATAL: could not send end-of-streaming message to primary: no COPY in progress

* slave's startup process observes that walreceiver is gone and sends
PMSIGNAL_START_WALRECEIVER to ask for a new one

* more often than you would guess, in fact nearly 100% reproducibly for
me, the postmaster receives/services the PMSIGNAL before it receives
SIGCHLD for the walreceiver. In this situation sigusr1_handler just
throws away the walreceiver start request, reasoning that the walreceiver
is already running.

* eventually, it dawns on the startup process that the walreceiver
isn't starting, and it asks for a new one. But that takes ten seconds
(WALRCV_STARTUP_TIMEOUT).

So this looks like a pretty obvious race condition in the postmaster,
which should be resolved by having it set a flag on receipt of
PMSIGNAL_START_WALRECEIVER that's cleared only when it does start a
new walreceiver. But I wonder whether it's intentional that the old
walreceiver dies in the first place. That FATAL exit looks suspiciously
like it wasn't originally-designed-in behavior.

regards, tom lane

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