I've been playing with a little hack that records a before and after
image of every page modification that is WAL-logged, and writes the
images to a file along with the LSN of the corresponding WAL record. I
set up a master-standby replication with that hack in place in both
servers, and ran the regression suite. Then I compared the after images
after every WAL record, as written on master, and as replayed by the
standby.
The idea is that the page content in the standby after replaying a WAL
record should be identical to the page in the master, when the WAL
record was generated. There are some known cases where that doesn't
hold, but it's a useful sanity check. To reduce noise, I've been
focusing on one access method at a time, filtering out others.
I did that for GIN first, and indeed found a bug in my new
incomplete-split code, see commit 594bac42. After fixing that, and
zeroing some padding bytes (38a2b95c), I'm now getting a clean run with
that.
Next, I took on GiST, and lo-and-behold found a bug there pretty quickly
as well. This one has been there ever since we got Hot Standby: the redo
of a page update (e.g an insertion) resets the right-link of the page.
If there is a concurrent scan, in a hot standby server, that scan might
still need the rightlink, and will hence miss some tuples. This can be
reproduced like this:
1. in master, create test table.
CREATE TABLE gisttest (id int4);
CREATE INDEX gisttest_idx ON gisttest USING gist (id);
INSERT INTO gisttest SELECT g * 1000 from generate_series(1, 100000) g;
-- Test function. Starts a scan, fetches one row from it, then waits 10
seconds until fetching the rest of the rows.
-- Returns the number of rows scanned. Should be 100000 if you follow
-- these test instructions.
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION gisttestfunc() RETURNS int AS
$$
declare
i int4;
t text;
cur CURSOR FOR SELECT 'foo' FROM gisttest WHERE id >= 0;
begin
set enable_seqscan=off; set enable_bitmapscan=off;
i = 0;
OPEN cur;
FETCH cur INTO t;
perform pg_sleep(10);
LOOP
EXIT WHEN NOT FOUND; -- this is bogus on first iteration
i = i + 1;
FETCH cur INTO t;
END LOOP;
CLOSE cur;
RETURN i;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;
2. in standby
SELECT gisttestfunc();
<blocks>
3. Quickly, before the scan in standby continues, cause some page splits:
INSERT INTO gisttest SELECT g * 1000+1 from generate_series(1, 100000) g;
4. The scan in standby finishes. It should return 100000, but will
return a lower number if you hit the bug.
At a quick glance, I think fixing that is just a matter of not resetting
the right-link. I'll take a closer look tomorrow, but for now I just
wanted to report what I've been doing. I'll post the scripts I've been
using later too - nag me if I don't.
- Heikki
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