Re: BUG #17744: Fail Assert while recoverying from pg_basebackup

On Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 03:22:58PM +0900, Kyotaro Horiguchi wrote:
> At Tue, 21 Feb 2023 12:51:51 +0900, Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> wrote in
>> commit 7ff23c6d277d1d90478a51f0dd81414d343f3850
>> Author: Thomas Munro <tmunro(at)postgresql(dot)org>
>> Date: Mon Aug 2 17:32:20 2021 +1200
>>
>> Run checkpointer and bgwriter in crash recovery.
>>
>> Start up the checkpointer and bgwriter during crash recovery (except in
>> --single mode), as we do for replication. This wasn't done back in
>> commit cdd46c76 out of caution. Now it seems like a better idea to make
>> the environment as similar as possible in both cases. There may also be
>> some performance advantages.
>
> Wouldn't just previnting restartpoints during crash recovery mean
> making this change inneffective? If something wrong actually happens
> when restartpoints happen during crash recovery, shouldn't we identify
> the cause and let restartpoints run safely during crash recovery?

I will let Thomas comment on that (now added in CC of this thread),
because, honestly, I am not sure.

Now, it seems to me that the original intent of starting the
checkpointer this early is to be able to unify the code path for the
end-of-recovery checkpoint, primarily, which is a fine goal in itself
because the startup process can query a checkpoint rather than doing
things itself. It is the fact of starting early the bgwriter that
showed most of the improvements in crash recovery with some aggressive
tuning setups, under specific workloads like heavy INSERTs.

This report is telling us that restartpoints during crash recovery may
not be a good idea without more careful consideration, even if the
original intent of 7ff23c6 is to allow them in the crash recovery
case. I am not sure about this last point. (Restartpoint is
mentioned once in the thread of this commit, FWIW.)
--
Michael