Wake up for latches in CheckpointWriteDelay().
authorThomas Munro <tmunro@postgresql.org>
Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:37:58 +0000 (13:37 +1300)
committerThomas Munro <tmunro@postgresql.org>
Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:57:59 +0000 (13:57 +1300)
commit5e6368b42ee6d4b59e085301ca7b0e50f37a897b
tree770884f4f9157bb286c3b86d6f7aa2040ab2d5ce
parenta56e7b66010f330782243de9e25ac2a6596be0e1
Wake up for latches in CheckpointWriteDelay().

The checkpointer shouldn't ignore its latch.  Other backends may be
waiting for it to drain the request queue.  Hopefully real systems don't
have a full queue often, but the condition is reached easily when
shared_buffers is small.

This involves defining a new wait event, which will appear in the
pg_stat_activity view often due to spread checkpoints.

Back-patch only to 14.  Even though the problem exists in earlier
branches too, it's hard to hit there.  In 14 we stopped using signal
handlers for latches on Linux, *BSD and macOS, which were previously
hiding this problem by interrupting the sleep (though not reliably, as
the signal could arrive before the sleep begins; precisely the problem
latches address).

Reported-by: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Reviewed-by: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20220226213942.nb7uvb2pamyu26dj%40alap3.anarazel.de
doc/src/sgml/monitoring.sgml
src/backend/postmaster/checkpointer.c
src/backend/utils/activity/wait_event.c
src/include/utils/wait_event.h