Re: Patch for fail-back without fresh backup

On 2014-01-16 09:25:51 -0800, Jeff Janes wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2013 at 2:43 PM, Andres Freund <andres@2ndquadrant.com>wrote:
>
> > On 2013-11-21 14:40:36 -0800, Jeff Janes wrote:
> > > But if the transaction would not have otherwise generated WAL (i.e. a
> > > select that did not have to do any HOT pruning, or an update with zero
> > rows
> > > matching the where condition), doesn't it now have to flush and wait when
> > > it would otherwise not?
> >
> > We short circuit that if there's no xid assigned. Check
> > RecordTransactionCommit().
> >
>
> It looks like that only short-circuits the flush if both there is no xid
> assigned, and !wrote_xlog.  (line 1054 of xact.c)

Hm. Indeed. Why don't we just always use the async commit behaviour for
that? I don't really see any significant dangers from doing so?

It's also rather odd to use the sync rep mechanisms in such
scenarios... The if() really should test markXidCommitted instead of
wrote_xlog.

> I do see stalls on fdatasync on flush from select statements which had no
> xid, but did generate xlog due to HOT pruning, I don't see why WAL logging
> hint bits would be different.

Are the stalls at commit or while the select is running? If wal_buffers
is filled too fast, which can easily happen if loads of pages are hinted
and wal logged, that will happen independently from

RecordTransactionCommit().