pgsql: Reduce stack space consumption in tzload().

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: pgsql-committers(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: pgsql: Reduce stack space consumption in tzload().
Date: 2016-07-07 15:28:24
Message-ID: E1bLBE0-0001ci-Cy@gemulon.postgresql.org
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Reduce stack space consumption in tzload().

While syncing our timezone code with IANA's updates in commit 1c1a7cbd6,
I'd chosen not to adopt the code they conditionally compile under #ifdef
ALL_STATE. The main thing that that drives is that the space for gmtime
and localtime timezone definitions isn't statically allocated, but is
malloc'd on first use. I reasoned we didn't need that logic: we don't have
localtime() at all, and we always initialize TimeZone to GMT so we always
need that one. But there is one other thing ALL_STATE does, which is to
make tzload() malloc its transient workspace instead of just declaring it
as a local variable. It turns out that that local variable occupies 78K.
Even worse is that, at least for common US timezone settings, there's a
recursive call to parse the "posixrules" zone name, making peak stack
consumption to select a time zone upwards of 150K. That's an uncomfortably
large fraction of our STACK_DEPTH_SLOP safety margin, and could result in
outright crashes if we try to reduce STACK_DEPTH_SLOP as has been discussed
recently. Furthermore, this means that the postmaster's peak stack
consumption is several times that of a backend running typical queries
(since, except on Windows, backends inherit the timezone GUC values and
don't ever run this code themselves unless you do SET TIMEZONE). That's
completely backwards from a safety perspective.

Hence, adopt the ALL_STATE rather than non-ALL_STATE variant of tzload(),
while not changing the other code aspects that symbol controls. The
risk of an ENOMEM error from malloc() seems less than that of a SIGSEGV
from stack overrun.

This should probably get back-patched along with 1c1a7cbd6 and followon
fixes, whenever we decide we have enough confidence in the updates to do
that.

Branch
------
master

Details
-------
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/62c8421e87b33b2e94f8a7842e1dd9aa1a286ffc

Modified Files
--------------
src/timezone/localtime.c | 12 ++++++++++--
1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

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