Re: [HACKERS] pg_dump disaster

* Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> [000121 08:14] wrote:
> Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net> writes:
> >>>> The answer appears to be that Perlstein's "nonblocking mode" patches
> >>>> have broken psql copy, and doubtless a lot of other applications as
> >>>> well, because pqPutBytes no longer feels any particular compulsion
> >>>> to actually send the data it's been handed.  (Moreover, if it does
> >>>> do only a partial send, there is no way to discover how much it sent;
> >>>> while its callers might be blamed for not having checked for an error
> >>>> return, they'd have no way to recover anyhow.)
> 
> > pqPutBytes _never_ felt any compulsion to flush the buffer to the backend,
> > or at least not since I started using it.
> 
> Sorry, I was insufficiently careful about my wording.  It's true that
> pqPutBytes doesn't worry about actually flushing the data out to the
> backend.  (It shouldn't, either, since it is typically called with small
> fragments of a message rather than complete messages.)  It did, however,
> take care to *accept* all the data it was given and ensure that the data
> was queued in the output buffer.  As the code now stands, it's
> impossible to tell whether all the passed data was queued or not, or how
> much of it was queued.  This is a fundamental design error, because the
> caller has no way to discover what to do after a failure return (nor
> even a way to tell if it was a hard failure or just I-won't-block).
> Moreover, no existing caller of PQputline thinks it should have to worry
> about looping around the call, so even if you put in a usable return
> convention, existing apps would still be broken.
> 
> Similarly, PQendcopy is now willing to return without having gotten
> the library out of the COPY state, but the caller can't easily tell
> what to do about it --- nor do existing callers believe that they
> should have to do anything about it.
> 
> > The implications of this is trully annoying, exporting the socket to
> > the backend to the client application causes all sorts of problems because
> > the person select()'ing on the socket sees that it's 'clear' but yet
> > all thier data has not been sent...
> 
> Yeah, the original set of exported routines was designed without any
> thought of handling a nonblock mode.  But you aren't going to be able
> to fix them this way.  There will need to be a new set of entry points
> that add a concept of "operation not complete" to their API, and apps
> that want to avoid blocking will need to call those instead.  Compare
> what's been done for connecting (PQconnectPoll) and COPY TO STDOUT
> (PQgetlineAsync).
> 
> It's possible that things were broken before you got to them --- there
> have been several sets of not-very-carefully-reviewed patches to libpq
> during the current development cycle, so someone else may have created
> the seeds of the problem.  However, we weren't seeing failures in psql
> before this week...

We both missed it, and yes it was my fault.  All connections are
behaving as if PQsetnonblocking(conn, TRUE) have been called on them.

The original non-blocking patches did something weird, they seemed
to _always_ stick the socket into non-blocking mode.  This would
activate my non-blocking stuff for all connections.

I assumed the only code that called the old makenonblocking function
was setup to handle this, unfortunatly it's not and you know what they
say about assumptions. :(

I should have a fix tonight.

sorry,
-Alfred