Prevent hard failures of standbys caused by recycled WAL segments
When a standby's WAL receiver stops reading WAL from a WAL stream, it
writes data to the current WAL segment without having priorily zero'ed
the page currently written to, which can cause the WAL reader to read
junk data from a past recycled segment and then it would try to get a
record from it. While sanity checks in place provide most of the
protection needed, in some rare circumstances, with chances increasing
when a record header crosses a page boundary, then the startup process
could fail violently on an allocation failure, as follows:
FATAL: invalid memory alloc request size XXX
This is confusing for the user and also unhelpful as this requires in
the worst case a manual restart of the instance, impacting potentially
the availability of the cluster, and this also makes WAL data look like
it is in a corrupted state.
The chances of seeing failures are higher if the connection between the
standby and its root node is unstable, causing WAL pages to be written
in the middle. A couple of approaches have been discussed, like
zero-ing new WAL pages within the WAL receiver itself but this has the
disadvantage of impacting performance of any existing instances as this
breaks the sequential writes done by the WAL receiver. This commit
deals with the problem with a more simple approach, which has no
performance impact without reducing the detection of the problem: if a
record is found with a length higher than 1GB for backends, then do not
try any allocation and report a soft failure which will force the
standby to retry reading WAL. It could be possible that the allocation
call passes and that an unnecessary amount of memory is allocated,
however follow-up checks on records would just fail, making this
allocation short-lived anyway.
This patch owes a great deal to Tsunakawa Takayuki for reporting the
failure first, and then discussing a couple of potential approaches to
the problem.
Backpatch down to 9.5, which is where palloc_extended has been
introduced.
Reported-by: Tsunakawa Takayuki
Reviewed-by: Tsunakawa Takayuki
Author: Michael Paquier
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/0A3221C70F24FB45833433255569204D1F8B57AD@G01JPEXMBYT05
Branch
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master
Details
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https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/70b4f82a4b5cab5fc12ff876235835053e407155
Modified Files
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src/backend/access/transam/xlogreader.c | 23 +++++++++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 23 insertions(+)