From owner-pgsql-hackers@hub.org Sun Jan 23 13:31:03 2000 Received: from renoir.op.net (root@renoir.op.net [207.29.195.4]) by candle.pha.pa.us (8.9.0/8.9.0) with ESMTP id NAA28482 for <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>; Sun, 23 Jan 2000 13:31:01 -0500 (EST) Received: from hub.org (hub.org [216.126.84.1]) by renoir.op.net (o1/$Revision: 1.2 $) with ESMTP id NAA08409 for <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>; Sun, 23 Jan 2000 13:04:34 -0500 (EST) Received: from localhost (majordom@localhost) by hub.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id MAA65651; Sun, 23 Jan 2000 12:57:33 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from owner-pgsql-hackers) Received: by hub.org (bulk_mailer v1.5); Sun, 23 Jan 2000 12:57:20 -0500 Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) id MAA65548 for pgsql-hackers-outgoing; Sun, 23 Jan 2000 12:56:20 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from owner-pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org) Received: from sss2.sss.pgh.pa.us (sss.pgh.pa.us [209.114.166.2]) by hub.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA65492 for <pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org>; Sun, 23 Jan 2000 12:55:41 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) Received: from sss2.sss.pgh.pa.us (tgl@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by sss2.sss.pgh.pa.us (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA06211; Sun, 23 Jan 2000 12:55:36 -0500 (EST) To: Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net> cc: pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org Subject: Re: pg_dump possible fix, need testers. (was: Re: [HACKERS] pg_dump disaster) In-reply-to: <20000123022341.J26520@fw.wintelcom.net> References: <20000122211427.C26520@fw.wintelcom.net> <200001230525.AAA08020@candle.pha.pa.us> <20000122220256.H26520@fw.wintelcom.net> <5120.948606837@sss.pgh.pa.us> <20000123022341.J26520@fw.wintelcom.net> Comments: In-reply-to Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net> message dated "Sun, 23 Jan 2000 02:23:41 -0800" Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 12:55:36 -0500 Message-ID: <6208.948650136@sss.pgh.pa.us> From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> Sender: owner-pgsql-hackers@postgreSQL.org Status: ORr >> Um, I didn't have any trouble at all reproducing Patrick's complaint. >> pg_dump any moderately large table (I used tenk1 from the regress >> database) and try to load the script with psql. Kaboom. > This is after or before my latest patch? Before. I haven't updated since yesterday... > I can't seem to reproduce this problem, Odd. Maybe there is something different about the kernel's timing of message sending on your platform. I see it very easily on HPUX 10.20, and Patrick sees it very easily on whatever he's using (netbsd I think). You might try varying the situation a little, say psql mydb <dumpfile psql -f dumpfile mydb psql mydb \i dumpfile and the same with -h localhost (to get a TCP/IP connection instead of Unix domain). At the moment (pre-patch) I see failures with the first two of these, but not with the \i method. -h doesn't seem to matter for me, but it might for you. > Telling me something is wrong without giving suggestions on how > to fix it, nor direct pointers to where it fails doesn't help me > one bit. You're not offering constructive critism, you're not > even offering valid critism, you're just waving your finger at > "problems" that you say exist but don't pin down to anything specific. I have been explaining it as clearly as I could. Let's try it one more time. > I spent hours looking over what I did to pqFlush and pqPutnBytes > because of what you said earlier when all the bug seems to have > come down to is that I missed that the socket is set to non-blocking > in all cases now. Letting the socket mode default to blocking will hide the problems from existing clients that don't care about non-block mode. But people who try to actually use the nonblock mode are going to see the same kinds of problems that psql is exhibiting. > The old sequence of events that happened was as follows: > user sends data almost filling the output buffer... > user sends another line of text overflowing the buffer... > pqFlush is invoked blocking the user until the output pipe clears... > and repeat. Right. > The nonblocking code allows sends to fail so the user can abort > sending stuff to the backend in order to process other work: > user sends data almost filling the output buffer... > user sends another line of text that may overflow the buffer... > pqFlush is invoked, > if the pipe can't be cleared an error is returned allowing the user to > retry the send later. > if the flush succeeds then more data is queued and success is returned But you haven't thought through the mechanics of the "error is returned allowing the user to retry" code path clearly enough. Let's take pqPutBytes for an example. If it returns EOF, is that a hard error or does it just mean that the application needs to wait a while? The application *must* distinguish these cases, or it will do the wrong thing: for example, if it mistakes a hard error for "wait a while", then it will wait forever without making any progress or producing an error report. You need to provide a different return convention that indicates what happened, say EOF (-1) => hard error (same as old code) 0 => OK 1 => no data was queued due to risk of blocking And you need to guarantee that the application knows what the state is when the can't-do-it-yet return is made; note that I specified "no data was queued" above. If pqPutBytes might queue some of the data before returning 1, the application is in trouble again. While you apparently foresaw that in recoding pqPutBytes, your code doesn't actually work. There is the minor code bug that you fail to update "avail" after the first pqFlush call, and the much more fundamental problem that you cannot guarantee to have queued all or none of the data. Think about what happens if the passed nbytes is larger than the output buffer size. You may pass the first pqFlush successfully, then get into the loop and get a won't-block return from pqFlush in the loop. What then? You can't simply refuse to support the case nbytes > bufsize at all, because that will cause application failures as well (too long query sends it into an infinite loop trying to queue data, most likely). A possible answer is to specify that a return of +N means "N bytes remain unqueued due to risk of blocking" (after having queued as much as you could). This would put the onus on the caller to update his pointers/counts properly; propagating that into all the internal uses of pqPutBytes would be no fun. (Of course, so far you haven't updated *any* of the internal callers to behave reasonably in case of a won't-block return; PQfn is just one example.) Another possible answer is to preserve pqPutBytes' old API, "queue or bust", by the expedient of enlarging the output buffer to hold whatever we can't send immediately. This is probably more attractive, even though a long query might suck up a lot of space that won't get reclaimed as long as the connection lives. If you don't do this then you are going to have to make a lot of ugly changes in the internal callers to deal with won't-block returns. Actually, a bulk COPY IN would probably be the worst case --- the app could easily load data into the buffer far faster than it could be sent. It might be best to extend PQputline to have a three-way return and add code there to limit the growth of the output buffer, while allowing all internal callers to assume that the buffer is expanded when they need it. pqFlush has the same kind of interface design problem: the same EOF code is returned for either a hard error or can't-flush-yet, but it would be disastrous to treat those cases alike. You must provide a 3-way return code. Furthermore, the same sort of 3-way return code convention will have to propagate out through anything that calls pqFlush (with corresponding documentation updates). pqPutBytes can be made to hide a pqFlush won't- block return by trying to enlarge the output buffer, but in most other places you won't have a choice except to punt it back to the caller. PQendcopy has the same interface design problem. It used to be that (unless you passed a null pointer) PQendcopy would *guarantee* that the connection was no longer in COPY state on return --- by resetting it, if necessary. So the return code was mainly informative; the application didn't have to do anything different if PQendcopy reported failure. But now, a nonblocking application does need to pay attention to whether PQendcopy completed or not --- and you haven't provided a way for it to tell. If 1 is returned, the connection might still be in COPY state, or it might not (PQendcopy might have reset it). If the application doesn't distinguish these cases then it will fail. I also think that you want to take a hard look at the automatic "reset" behavior upon COPY failure, since a PQreset call will block the application until it finishes. Really, what is needed to close down a COPY safely in nonblock mode is a pair of entry points along the line of "PQendcopyStart" and "PQendcopyPoll", with API conventions similar to PQresetStart/PQresetPoll. This gives you the ability to do the reset (if one is necessary) without blocking the application. PQendcopy itself will only be useful to blocking applications. > I'm sorry if they don't work for some situations other than COPY IN, > but it's functionality that I needed and I expect to be expanded on > by myself and others that take interest in nonblocking operation. I don't think that the nonblock code is anywhere near production quality at this point. It may work for you, if you don't stress it too hard and never have a communications failure; but I don't want to see us ship it as part of Postgres unless these issues get addressed. regards, tom lane ************ From pgsql-hackers-owner+M3768@postgresql.org Wed Jan 24 14:20:02 2001 Received: from mail.postgresql.org (webmail.postgresql.org [216.126.85.28]) by candle.pha.pa.us (8.9.0/8.9.0) with ESMTP id OAA25380 for <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>; Wed, 24 Jan 2001 14:20:02 -0500 (EST) Received: from mail.postgresql.org (webmail.postgresql.org [216.126.85.28]) by mail.postgresql.org (8.11.1/8.11.1) with SMTP id f0OJHTq57982; Wed, 24 Jan 2001 14:17:29 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from pgsql-hackers-owner+M3768@postgresql.org) Received: from fw.wintelcom.net (ns1.wintelcom.net [209.1.153.20]) by mail.postgresql.org (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id f0OIXnq49509 for <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>; Wed, 24 Jan 2001 13:33:49 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from bright@fw.wintelcom.net) Received: (from bright@localhost) by fw.wintelcom.net (8.10.0/8.10.0) id f0OIXgi14650; Wed, 24 Jan 2001 10:33:42 -0800 (PST) Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2001 10:33:42 -0800 From: Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net> To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> Cc: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Libpq async issues Message-ID: <20010124103342.B26076@fw.wintelcom.net> References: <6208.948650136@sss.pgh.pa.us> <200101241339.IAA11747@candle.pha.pa.us> <20010124084720.T26076@fw.wintelcom.net> <13021.980355551@sss.pgh.pa.us> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <13021.980355551@sss.pgh.pa.us>; from tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us on Wed, Jan 24, 2001 at 11:59:11AM -0500 Precedence: bulk Sender: pgsql-hackers-owner@postgresql.org Status: OR * Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> [010124 10:27] wrote: > Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net> writes: > > * Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> [010124 07:58] wrote: > >> I have added this email to TODO.detail and a mention in the TODO list. > > > The bug mentioned here is long gone, > > Au contraire, the misdesign is still there. The nonblock-mode code > will *never* be reliable under stress until something is done about > that, and that means fairly extensive code and API changes. The "bug" is the one mentioned in the first paragraph of the email where I broke _blocking_ connections for a short period. I still need to fix async connections for myself (and of course contribute it back), but I just haven't had the time. If anyone else wants it fixed earlier they can wait for me to do it, do it themself, contract me to do it or hope someone else comes along to fix it. I'm thinking that I'll do what you said and have seperate paths for writing/reading to the socket and API's to do so that give the user the option of a boundry, basically: buffer this, but don't allow me to write until it's flushed which would allow for larger than 8k COPY rows to go into the backend. -- -Alfred Perlstein - [bright@wintelcom.net|alfred@freebsd.org] "I have the heart of a child; I keep it in a jar on my desk."