Sorry..."designed" was poor choice of words, I meant "not unexpected". Doing the checkpoint right after pg_stop_backup() looks like it will work perfectly for me, so thanks for all your help!
On a side note I am sporadically seeing another error on hotstandby startup. I'm not terribly concerned about it as it is pretty rare and it will work on a retry so it's not a big deal. The error is "FATAL: out-of-order XID insertion in KnownAssignedXids". If you think it might be a bug and are interested in hunting it down let me know and I'll help any way I can...but if you're not too worried about it then neither am I :)
On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Simon Riggs
<simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 27, 2011 at 10:09 PM, Chris Redekop <
chris@replicon.com> wrote:
> hrmz, still basically the same behaviour. I think it might be a *little*
> better with this patch. Before when under load it would start up quickly
> maybe 2 or 3 times out of 10 attempts....with this patch it might be up to 4
> or 5 times out of 10...ish...or maybe it was just fluke *shrug*. I'm still
> only seeing your log statement a single time (I'm running at debug2). I
> have discovered something though - when the standby is in this state if I
> force a checkpoint on the primary then the standby comes right up. Is there
> anything I check or try for you to help figure this out?....or is it
> actually as designed that it could take 10-ish minutes to start up even
> after all clients have disconnected from the primary?
subject to chance; its not a performance patch.
It's not "designed" to act the way you describe, but it does.
The reason this occurs is that you have a transaction heavy workload
with occasional periods of complete quiet and a base backup time that
is much less than checkpoint_timeout. If your base backup was slower
the checkpoint would have hit naturally before recovery had reached a
consistent state. Which seems fairly atypical. I guess you're doing
this on a test system.
It seems cheap to add in a call to LogStandbySnapshot() after each
call to pg_stop_backup().
Does anyone think this case is worth adding code for? Seems like one
more thing to break.