On 12/12/2013 04:00 AM, Kyotaro HORIGUCHI wrote:
Hello, we happened to see server crash on archive recovery under
some condition.

After TLI was incremented, there should be the case that the WAL
file for older timeline is archived but not for that of the same
segment id but for newer timeline. Archive recovery should fail
for the case with PANIC error like follows,

| PANIC: record with zero length at 0/1820D40

Replay script is attached. This issue occured for 9.4dev, 9.3.2,
and not for 9.2.6 and 9.1.11. The latter search pg_xlog for the
TLI before trying archive for older TLIs.

This occurrs during fetching checkpoint redo record in archive
recovery.

if (checkPoint.redo < RecPtr)
{
        /* back up to find the record */
        record = ReadRecord(xlogreader, checkPoint.redo, PANIC, false);

Hmm. After running the script, pg_controldata says:

Latest checkpoint location:           0/2000090
Prior checkpoint location:            0/2000090
Latest checkpoint's REDO location:    0/2000090

The PANIC is actually coming from here:

        /*
         * Re-fetch the last valid or last applied record, so we can identify 
the
         * exact endpoint of what we consider the valid portion of WAL.
         */
        record = ReadRecord(xlogreader, LastRec, PANIC, false);

If recovery started from an online checkpoint, then I think you'd get a similar PANIC from the code you quoted.

And this is caused by that the segment file for older timeline in
archive directory is preferred to that for newer timeline in
pg_xlog.

Yep.

Looking into pg_xlog before trying the older TLIs in archive like
9.2- fixes this issue. The attached patch is one possible
solution for 9.4dev.

Attached files are,

  - recvtest.sh: Replay script. Step 1 and 2 makes the condition
    and step 3 causes the issue.

  - archrecvfix_20131212.patch: The patch fixes the issue. Archive
    recovery reads pg_xlog before trying older TLI in archive
    similarly to 9.1- by this patch.

Hmm, that seems reasonable at a quick glance. I think it also needs a change to the state transition code earlier in the loop, to not move from XLOG_FROM_ARCHIVE to XLOG_FROM_PG_XLOG, if we've already tried reading pg_xlog.

Another way to look at this is that it's wrong that we immediately PANIC if we successfully restore a file from archive, but then fail to read the record we're looking for. Instead, we should advance to next state in the state machine, ie. try reading the same record from pg_xlog, and only give up if the read fails from all sources.

Yet another way to look at this is that we shouldn't even try to read the file with TLI 1 from the archive, when we know the checkpoint record is on timeline 2. It can't possibly work.

I've been thinking for some time that we should stop doing the scan of all possible TLIs, and only try to read the exact file that contains the record we're reading. We have that information now, in the timeline history file, and we already do that during streaming replication. I was afraid of changing the behavior of archive recovery in 9.4, but maybe that's the way to go in the long term.

- Heikki


--
Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers

Reply via email to