Adding a TAP test checking data consistency on standby with minRecoveryPoint

"Michael" == Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz> writes:

Michael> I have also been trying to shape that into a TAP test which
Michael> can be added into the in-core recovery test suite, and it
Michael> happens that the part which scans if all the pages of a
Michael> relation are not newer than what minRecoveryPoint is set to in
Michael> the control file can be easily calculated by using pageinspect
Michael> and pg_control_recovery() with a simple SQL query.

How? It's OK (and normal) for in-core pages to have newer LSNs than
minRecoveryPoint, it's only on-disk pages that must not be more recent
than that. And pageinspect will show the in-core page...

--
Andrew (irc:RhodiumToad)

On Thu, Nov 08, 2018 at 05:04:35AM +0000, Andrew Gierth wrote:

How? It's OK (and normal) for in-core pages to have newer LSNs than
minRecoveryPoint, it's only on-disk pages that must not be more recent
than that. And pageinspect will show the in-core page...

If the standby is stopped cleanly once, what's in shared buffers gets
flushed to disk by the checkpointer once at shutdown, forcing
minRecoveryPoint to be updated by the checkpointer, and that update was
not happening beforethe fix. And once the standby is started again,
what's on disk gets reloaded, showing the inconsistency.
--
Michael

"Michael" == Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz> writes:

How? It's OK (and normal) for in-core pages to have newer LSNs than
minRecoveryPoint, it's only on-disk pages that must not be more
recent than that. And pageinspect will show the in-core page...

Michael> If the standby is stopped cleanly once, what's in shared
Michael> buffers gets flushed to disk by the checkpointer once at
Michael> shutdown, forcing minRecoveryPoint to be updated by the
Michael> checkpointer, and that update was not happening beforethe fix.
Michael> And once the standby is started again, what's on disk gets
Michael> reloaded, showing the inconsistency.

Ah, I missed that you were shutting down.

I think it would be nice to have a test that didn't rely on that, too.

--
Andrew (irc:RhodiumToad)

On Thu, Nov 08, 2018 at 06:00:29AM +0000, Andrew Gierth wrote:

I think it would be nice to have a test that didn't rely on that, too.

Yes, I don't disagree with you and I thought about it. Fetching the
value from the control file is easy, doing the comparison between two
LSNs is also simple by doing it directly with pg_lsn in the database
(and I don't want to add math logics about LSNs as a TAP API). Now I am
less sure about how portable it is possible to make the read of 8 bytes
on the page header for the last page of a relation portable across many
architectures in perl.

And I am not sure that we actually need this addition that as the
standby spawned in the TAP test will not have any clients scanning the
pages and generating WAL, except autovacuum which would be better
switched off in the test.
--
Michael

On Thu, Nov 08, 2018 at 04:00:26PM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:

Yes, I don't disagree with you and I thought about it. Fetching the
value from the control file is easy, doing the comparison between two
LSNs is also simple by doing it directly with pg_lsn in the database
(and I don't want to add math logics about LSNs as a TAP API). Now I am
less sure about how portable it is possible to make the read of 8 bytes
on the page header for the last page of a relation portable across many
architectures in perl.

Has a perl monk a specific idea here? It seems to me that the amount of
specific facility which would be needed overweights the current
simplicity of the test.
--
Michael

"Michael" == Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz> writes:

On Thu, Nov 08, 2018 at 04:00:26PM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:

Yes, I don't disagree with you and I thought about it. Fetching the
value from the control file is easy, doing the comparison between
two LSNs is also simple by doing it directly with pg_lsn in the
database (and I don't want to add math logics about LSNs as a TAP
API). Now I am less sure about how portable it is possible to make
the read of 8 bytes on the page header for the last page of a
relation portable across many architectures in perl.

Michael> Has a perl monk a specific idea here? It seems to me that the
Michael> amount of specific facility which would be needed overweights
Michael> the current simplicity of the test.

Seems simple enough - the LSN on the page is actually two 4-byte values
with the most significant one first, regardless of platform byte order
(though each individual word is in native order), so

my ($hi,$lo) = unpack("LL", $buf);

should suffice. ("L" is always 32 bits regardless of platform, and it
has the platform's endianness.)

Looking only at the last page seems questionable. Something like this
should work to return the largest LSN of any page in the specified list
of files:

# find_largest_lsn(blocksize,filenames...)
sub find_largest_lsn
{
my $blocksize = shift;
my @filenames = ref($_[0]) eq 'ARRAY' ? @{$_[0]} : @_;
my ($max_hi,$max_lo) = (0,0);
for my $filename (@filenames)
{
open(my $fh, "<:raw", $filename)
or die "failed to open $filename: $!";
my ($buf,$len);
while ($len = read($fh, $buf, $blocksize))
{
$len == $blocksize
or die "read only $len of $blocksize bytes from $filename";
my ($hi,$lo) = unpack("LL", $buf);
($max_hi,$max_lo) = ($hi,$lo)
if ($hi > $max_hi or ($hi == $max_hi and $lo > $max_lo));
}
defined($len) or die "read error on $filename: $!";
close($fh);
}
return sprintf("%X/%X", $max_hi, $max_lo);
}

--
Andrew (irc:RhodiumToad)

On Fri, Nov 09, 2018 at 12:42:27PM +0000, Andrew Gierth wrote:

Seems simple enough - the LSN on the page is actually two 4-byte values
with the most significant one first, regardless of platform byte order
(though each individual word is in native order), so

my ($hi,$lo) = unpack("LL", $buf);

should suffice. ("L" is always 32 bits regardless of platform, and it
has the platform's endianness.)

Thanks for the review, Andrew. And I completely forgot that this is at
the beginning of the page.

Looking only at the last page seems questionable.

I have switched also the online check so as it also looks at the full
range of blocks instead of only the last one.

Something like this should work to return the largest LSN of any page
in the specified list of files:

# find_largest_lsn(blocksize,filenames...)
sub find_largest_lsn

Thanks! I am stealing that stuff, and I have added an offline check by
comparing the value of minRecoveryPoint in pg_controldata. Again, if
you revert c186ba13 and run the tests, both online and offline failures
are showing up.

What do you think?
--
Michael

On Mon, Nov 12, 2018 at 01:08:38PM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:

Thanks! I am stealing that stuff, and I have added an offline check by
comparing the value of minRecoveryPoint in pg_controldata. Again, if
you revert c186ba13 and run the tests, both online and offline failures
are showing up.

What do you think?

I think that this test has some value, and it did not get any reviews,
so I am moving it to the next CF.
--
Michael

Hi,

I applied the patch on current master and run the tests, but I am afraid that the newly introduced test failed on installcheck-world:

```t/016_min_consistency.pl ............. # Looks like your test exited with 29 before it could output anything.
t/016_min_consistency.pl ............. Dubious, test returned 29 (wstat 7424, 0x1d00)
Failed 2/2 subtests

Test Summary Report
-------------------
t/016_min_consistency.pl (Wstat: 7424 Tests: 0 Failed: 0)
Non-zero exit status: 29
Parse errors: Bad plan. You planned 2 tests but ran 0.
Files=16, Tests=143, 65 wallclock secs ( 0.04 usr 0.04 sys + 6.53 cusr 5.08 csys = 11.69 CPU)
Result: FAIL```

To be honest, I have not checked closely on the failure, still it is the only test failing which by itself should be worthwhile mentioning.

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 02:35:49PM +0000, Georgios Kokolatos wrote:

To be honest, I have not checked closely on the failure, still it is
the only test failing which by itself should be worthwhile
mentioning.

This works for me, as well as a plain installcheck and check from the
subpath. Are you sure that contrib/pageinspect is installed in the
set of binaries your tests are using? What do the logs of the server
tell you? These are located in src/test/recovery/tmp_check/. Please
note that when running installcheck we assume that all the needed
components are installed.
--
Michael

On 12.03.2019 08:19, Michael Paquier wrote:

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 02:35:49PM +0000, Georgios Kokolatos wrote:

To be honest, I have not checked closely on the failure, still it is
the only test failing which by itself should be worthwhile
mentioning.

This works for me, as well as a plain installcheck and check from the
subpath. Are you sure that contrib/pageinspect is installed in the
set of binaries your tests are using? What do the logs of the server
tell you? These are located in src/test/recovery/tmp_check/. Please
note that when running installcheck we assume that all the needed
components are installed.

On my environment installcheck passes as well as check. Also I ran tests
with reverted c186ba13, 016_min_consistency.pl doesn't pass as expected.

--
Arthur Zakirov
Postgres Professional: http://www.postgrespro.com
Russian Postgres Company

Hi,

you are right in saying that my comment didn't offer much of a constructive explanation.
Apologies for that.

To the issue at hand. Tests were run in the same manner as in all other cases and the test
in question was the only one to fail in the whole tree.

By looking a bit closer to the error, the culprit seems to be the missing installation of
`pageinspect`, as it was correctly pointed out. I did notice before sending the first message in
the thread that `contrib/pageinspect` was added to the `EXTRA_INSTALL` variable and I
*assumed* that it should be properly installed to the system. However that was not the case.

Without being a recursive Makefile guru, I noticed one has to explicitly
$(call recurse,checkprep, $(recurse_alldirs_targets))
in `src/test/Makefile` in order for the call to `checkprep` to be made for running
make check or installcheck or any other of the variants.

Having said all the above, and after spending more time reviewing the whole patch
I do think it is worthwhile committing, as long as it is not tripping any users up with unexpected
test errors due to incomplete installations.

I hope this comment helps a bit more.

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 01:16:14PM +0300, Arthur Zakirov wrote:

On my environment installcheck passes as well as check. Also I ran tests
with reverted c186ba13, 016_min_consistency.pl doesn't pass as expected.

Thanks all for the feedback! I have done an extra pass on the new,
tweaking some sentences in the comments, and committed it.
--
Michael

On Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 12:22 AM Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz> wrote:

On Tue, Mar 12, 2019 at 01:16:14PM +0300, Arthur Zakirov wrote:

On my environment installcheck passes as well as check. Also I ran tests
with reverted c186ba13, 016_min_consistency.pl doesn't pass as expected.

Seems like there might be a problem either caused by or detected by
016_min_consistency.pl on piculet:

https://buildfarm.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/show_log.pl?nm=piculet&amp;dt=2019-03-23%2022%3A28%3A59

--
Peter Geoghegan

On Sat, Mar 23, 2019 at 04:08:42PM -0700, Peter Geoghegan wrote:

Seems like there might be a problem either caused by or detected by
016_min_consistency.pl on piculet:

https://buildfarm.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/show_log.pl?nm=piculet&amp;dt=2019-03-23%2022%3A28%3A59

Interesting. Based on what regress_log_016_min_consistency tells,
the test attempts to stop the standby in fast mode but it fails
because of a timeout:
### Stopping node "standby" using mode fast
[...]
pg_ctl: server does not shut down
Bail out! system pg_ctl failed

There is only one place in the tests where that happens, and before
attempting to stop the standby we issue a checkpoint on it with its
primary killed:
# Issue a restart point on the standby now, which makes the checkpointer
# update minRecoveryPoint.
$standby->safe_psql('postgres', 'CHECKPOINT;');
[...]
$primary->stop('immediate');
$standby->stop('fast');

The failure is a bit weird, as I would expect all those three actions
to be sequential. piculet is the only failure happening on the
buildfarm and it uses --disable-atomics, so I am wondering if that is
related and if 0dfe3d0 is part of that. With a primary/standby set,
it could be possible to test that scenario pretty easily. I'll give
it a shot.
--
Michael

On Sun, Mar 24, 2019 at 09:47:58PM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:

The failure is a bit weird, as I would expect all those three actions
to be sequential. piculet is the only failure happening on the
buildfarm and it uses --disable-atomics, so I am wondering if that is
related and if 0dfe3d0 is part of that. With a primary/standby set,
it could be possible to test that scenario pretty easily. I'll give
it a shot.

The buildfarm has just failed with a similar failure, for another
test aka 009_twophase.pl:
https://buildfarm.postgresql.org/cgi-bin/show_log.pl?nm=dragonet&amp;dt=2019-04-16%2006%3A14%3A01

I think that we have race conditions with checkpointing and shutdown
on HEAD.
--
Michael

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 2:45 AM Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz> wrote:

I think that we have race conditions with checkpointing and shutdown
on HEAD.

Any idea whether it's something newly-introduced or of long standing?

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 03:16:17PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:

On Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 2:45 AM Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz> wrote:

I think that we have race conditions with checkpointing and shutdown
on HEAD.

Any idea whether it's something newly-introduced or of long standing?

I would suggest to keep the discussion on the more general thread I
have created a couple of days ago:
/messages/by-id/20190416070119.GK2673@paquier.xyz

Thanks,
--
Michael