Re: Summary and Plan for Hot Standby

Simon Riggs wrote:
> We need to wait for all current transactions to complete. (i.e. any
> backend that has (or could) take an xid or an AccessExclusiveLock before
> it commits.). Similar-ish to the wait for a CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY.
>
> The standby already performs this wait in the case where we overflow the
> snapshot, so we have >64 subtransactions on *any* current transaction on
> the master. The reason for that is (again) performance on master: we
> choose not to WAL log new subtransactions.

WAL-logging every new subtransaction wouldn't actually help. The problem
with subtransactions is that if the subxid cache overflows in the proc
array in the master, the information about the parent-child
relationshiop is only stored in pg_subtrans, not in proc array. So when
we take the running-xacts snapshot, we can't include that information,
because there's no easy and fast way to scan pg_subtrans for it. Because
that information is not included in the snapshot, the standby doesn't
have all the information it needs until after it has seen that all the
transactions that had an overflowed xid cache have finished.

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com