Re: BUG #16785: Postgresql shutdown during initial pg_prewarm prewarming causes Pg to get stuck

PG Bug reporting form <noreply(at)postgresql(dot)org> writes:
> We use pg_prewarm via shared_preload_libraries and we've noticed that if we
> start Pg then stop it again before pg_prewarm finishes its initial
> prewarming, Pg gets stuck in shutdown until we kill the 'autoprewarm master'
> process with 'kill -9'.

Yeah. I assume you've got multiple large databases? When I try this
here, the current autoprewarm worker process shuts down promptly, but
then the master process tries to launch another worker for the next DB,
and then just sits there because the postmaster is now ignoring worker
start requests.

So this is partly autoprewarm's fault, because it's taking no thought
for the possibility that a shutdown will be requested before it's
managed to preload everything. But it's *mostly* the fault of the
incredibly brain-dead design for background workers, which has no
way to tell worker requestors that their request is never going to
be granted. I've ranted about that before, with little effect on
the people responsible, so I guess at some point I'm going to have
to go fix it myself.

In the meantime, attached is a proposed patch that improves
autoprewarm's behavior. It will only get stuck if you're unlucky
enough to issue "pg_ctl stop" just as it's trying to launch
another worker, which should be a pretty tight window.

I noticed while testing this that when autoprewarm did get out of
the situation promptly, it'd rewrite autoprewarm.blocks with only
as many blocks as it'd managed to prewarm before being canceled.
This doesn't seem like a good thing, because then the next start
might have next door to no prewarm behavior. So the patch also
hacks it to skip the final autoprewarm.blocks dump if we were
told to terminate before the initial prewarming pass is done.

This is against HEAD but it seems to apply cleanly to v12.
If you're in a position to rebuild pg_prewarm with the patch,
please see if it resolves the problem for you.

regards, tom lane