Re: Enhance pg_dump multi-threaded streaming (WAS: Re: filesystem full during vacuum - space recovery issues)

Hi Scott,

I realize some of the background was snipped on what I sent to the hacker list, I'll try to fill in the details.

Short background is very large database ran out of space during vacuum full taking down the server.  There is a replica which was applying the WALs and so it too ran out of space.  On restart after clearing some space, the database came back up but left over the in-progress rebuild files.  I've cleared that replica and am using it as my rebuild target just now.

Trying to identify the 'orphan' files and move them away always led to the database spotting the supposedly unused files having gone and refusing to start, so I had no successful way to clean up and get space back.

Last resort after discussion is pg_dumpall & reload.  I'm doing this via a network pipe (netcat) as I do not have the vast amount of storage necessary for the dump file to be stored (in any format).

Do you actually have 100G networking between the nodes? Because if not, a single CPU should be able to saturate 10G. 

Servers connect via 10G WAN; sending is not the issue, it's application of the incoming stream on the destination which is bottlenecked.

Likewise the receiving end would need disk capable of keeping up. Which brings up the question, why not write to disk, but directly to the destination rather than write locally then copy?

In this case, it's not a local write, it's piped via netcat.

Do you require dump-reload because of suspected corruption? That's a tough one. But if not, if the goal is just to get up and running on a new server, why not pg_basebackup, streaming replica, promote? That depends on the level of data modification activity being low enough that pg_basebackup can keep up with WAL as it's generated and apply it faster than new WAL comes in, but given that your server is currently keeping up with writing that much WAL and flushing that many changes, seems likely it would keep up as long as the network connection is fast enough. Anyway, in that scenario, you don't need to care how long pg_basebackup takes.

If you do need a dump/reload because of suspected corruption, the only thing I can think of is something like doing it a table at a time--partitioning would help here, if practical.

The basebackup is, to the best of my understanding, essentially just copying the database files.  Since the failed vacuum has left extra files, my expectation is these too would be copied, leaving me in the same position I started in.  If I'm wrong, please tell me as that would be vastly quicker - it is how I originally set up the replica and it took only a few hours on the 10G link.

The inability to get a clean start if I move any files out the way leads me to be concerned for some underlying corruption/issue and the recommendation earlier in the discussion was opt for dump/reload as the fail-safe.

Resigned to my fate, my thoughts were to see if there is a way to improve the dump-reload approach for the future.  Since dump-reload is the ultimate upgrade suggestion in the documentation, it seems worthwhile to see if there is a way to improve the performance of that especially as very large databases like mine are a thing with PostgreSQL.  From a quick review of pg_dump.c (I'm no expert on it obviously), it feels like it's already doing most of what needs done and the addition is some sort of multi-thread coordination with a restore client to ensure each thread can successfully complete each task it has before accepting more work.  I realize that's actually difficult to implement.

Thanks

Tom