BUGFIX: standby disconnect can corrupt serialized reorder buffers

From: Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
To: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Cc: Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de>
Subject: BUGFIX: standby disconnect can corrupt serialized reorder buffers
Date: 2017-12-05 05:58:23
Message-ID: CAMsr+YHdX=XECbZshDZ2CZNWGTyw-taYBnzqVfx4JzM4ExP5xg@mail.gmail.com
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Hi all

TL;DR: we should delete pg_replslot/$SLOTNAME/* at the start of each
decoding session or we can accidentally re-use stale reorder buffer
contents from prior runs and $BADNESS happens. StartupReorderBuffer() is
not sufficient.

Details:

Petr and I have found a bug in logical decoding where changes get appended
multiple times to serialized reorder buffers. This causes duplicate changes
sent to downstream (conflicts, ERRORs, etc).

Symptoms are:

* Oversized serialized reorder buffers in pg_replslot. In the case we found
this problem in, there was a 147GB reorder buffer that should only have
been 12GB.

* Downstream/receiver working hard but achieving nothing (pglogical/bdr
with conflict resolution enabled), or failing with unique violations and
other errors (built-in logical replication)

Debugging showed that logical decoding was calling the output plugin many
times with the same set of ReorderBufferChange records. It'd advance
normally, then go back to the start of a page address or similar and go
through them all all over again.

Log analysis showed that the downstream had been repeatedly connecting to
the upstream, then ERRORing out, so the upstream logs were full of

LOG: could not receive data from client: Connection reset by peer
LOG: unexpected EOF on standby connection

When the downstream error was fixed, the repeated changes were seen.

The cause appears to be that walsender.c's ProcessRepliesIfAny writes a LOG
for unexpected EOF then calls proc_exit(0). But serialized txn cleanup is
done by
ReorderBufferRestoreCleanup, as called by ReorderBufferCleanupTXN, which is
invoked from the PG_CATCH() in ReorderBufferCommit() and on various normal
exits. It won't get called if we proc_exit() without an ERROR, so we leave
stale data lying around.

It's not a problem on crash restart because StartupReorderBuffer already
does the required delete.

ReorderBufferSerializeTXN, which spills the txns to disk, doesn't appear to
have any guard to ensure that the segment files don't already exist when it
goes to serialize a snapshot. Adding one there would probably be expensive;
we don't know the last lsn of the txn yet, so to be really safe we'd have
to do a directory listing and scan for any txn-$OURXID-* entries.

So to fix, I suggest that we should do a
slot-specific StartupReorderBuffer-style deletion when we start a new
decoding session on a slot, per attached patch.

It might be nice to also add a hook on proc exit, so we don't have stale
buffers lying around until next decoding session, but I didn't want to add
new global state to reorderbuffer.c so I've left that for now.

BTW, while this bug looks similar to
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/54e4e488-186b-a056-6628-50628e4e4ebc@lab.ntt.co.jp
"Failed to delete old ReorderBuffer spilled files" it's really quite a
separate issue.

Both this bugfix and the above need backpatching to 9.4.

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services

Attachment Content-Type Size
v1-0001-Clean-up-reorder-buffer-files-when-starting-logic.patch text/x-patch 4.8 KB

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