In ResolveRecoveryConflictWithLock, there is the comment:
/*
* If blowing away everybody with conflicting locks doesn't work, after
* the first two attempts then we just start blowing everybody away until
* it does work.
But what it does is something different than that.
At least under some conditions, it will wait patiently for all initially conflicting locks to go away. If that doesn't work twice (because new lockers joined while we were waiting for the old ones to go away), then it will wait patiently for all transactions throughout the system to go away even if they don't conflict, perhaps not even realizing that the lock has become free in the mean time.
Then when its patience runs out, it kills everything on the system. But it never tried to blow away just the conflicting locks, instead it just tried to wait them out.
The fact that trying to wait them out didn't work (twice) doesn't mean that killing them wouldn't have worked.
I think that it was intended that num_attempts would get incremented only once WaitExceedsMaxStandbyDelay becomes true, but that is not what happens with the current code.
Currently WaitExceedsMaxStandbyDelay only has one caller. I think it we should take the sleep code out of that function and move it into the existing call site, and then have ResolveRecoveryConflictWithLock check with WaitExceedsMaxStandbyDelay before incrementing num_attempts.
I agree with the problem in the current code, thank you for spotting it.
I also agree that the proposed solution would work-ish, if we are suggesting backpatching this.
It's now possible to fix this by putting a lock wait on the actual lock request, which wasn't available when I first wrote that, hence the crappy wait loop. Using the timeout handler would now be the preferred way to solve this. We can backpatch that to 9.3 if needed, where they were introduced.
There's an example of how to use lock waits further down on ResolveRecoveryConflictWithBufferPin(). Could you have a look at doing it that way?
We probably also need to resurrect my earlier patch to avoid logging AccessExclusiveLocks on temp tables.
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Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services