## Problem
We've had bugs where the compute would use the stale default stripe size
from an unsharded tenant after the tenant split with a new stripe size.
## Summary of changes
Never specify a stripe size for unsharded tenants, to guard against
misuse. Only specify it once tenants are sharded and the stripe size
can't change.
Also opportunistically changes `GetPageSplitter` to return
`anyhow::Result`, since we'll be using this in other code paths as well
(specifically during server-side shard splits).
## Problem
Postgres will often immediately follow a relation existence check with a
relation size query. This incurs two roundtrips, and may prevent
effective caching.
See [Slack
thread](https://databricks.slack.com/archives/C091SDX74SC/p1751951732136139).
Touches #11728.
## Summary of changes
For the gRPC API:
* Add an `allow_missing` parameter to `GetRelSize`, which returns
`missing=true` instead of a `NotFound` error.
* Remove `CheckRelExists`.
There are no changes to libpq behavior.
## Problem
`ShardStripeSize` will be used in the compute spec and internally in the
communicator. It shouldn't require pulling in all of `pageserver_api`.
## Summary of changes
Move `ShardStripeSize` into `utils::shard`, along with other basic shard
types. Also remove the `Default` implementation, to discourage clients
from falling back to a default (it's generally a footgun).
The type is still re-exported from `pageserver_api::shard`, along with
all the other shard types.
## Problem
The communicator gRPC client currently uses bounded client/stream pools.
This can artificially constrain clients, especially after we remove
pipelining in #12584.
[Benchmarks](https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/12583) show that
the cost of an idle server-side GetPage worker task is about 26 KB (2.5
GB for 100,000), so we can afford to scale out.
In the worst case, we'll degenerate to the current libpq state with one
stream per backend, but without the TCP connection overhead. In the
common case we expect significantly lower stream counts due to stream
sharing, driven e.g. by idle backends, LFC hits, read coalescing,
sharding (backends typically only talk to one shard at a time), etc.
Currently, Pageservers rarely serve more than 4000 backend connections,
so we have at least 2 orders of magnitude of headroom.
Touches #11735.
Requires #12584.
## Summary of changes
Remove the pool limits, and restructure the pools.
We still keep a separate bulk pool for Getpage batches of >4 pages (>32
KB), with fewer streams per connection. This reduces TCP-level
congestion and head-of-line blocking for non-bulk requests, and
concentrates larger window sizes on a smaller set of
streams/connections, presumably reducing memory usage. Apart from this,
bulk requests don't have any latency penalty compared to other requests.
## Problem
The communicator gRPC client currently attempts to pipeline GetPage
requests from multiple callers onto the same gRPC stream. This has a
number of issues:
* Head-of-line blocking: the request may block on e.g. layer download or
LSN wait, delaying the next request.
* Cancellation: we can't easily cancel in-progress requests (e.g. due to
timeout or backend termination), so it may keep blocking the next
request (even its own retry).
* Complex stream scheduling: picking a stream becomes harder/slower, and
additional Tokio tasks and synchronization is needed for stream
management.
Touches #11735.
Requires #12579.
## Summary of changes
This patch removes pipelining of gRPC stream requests, and instead
prefers to scale out the number of streams to achieve the same
throughput. Stream scheduling has been rewritten, and mostly follows the
same pattern as the client pool with exclusive acquisition by a single
caller.
[Benchmarks](https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/12583) show that
the cost of an idle server-side GetPage worker task is about 26 KB (2.5
GB for 100,000), so we can afford to scale out.
This has a number of advantages:
* It (mostly) eliminates head-of-line blocking (except at the TCP
level).
* Cancellation becomes trivial, by closing the stream.
* Stream scheduling becomes significantly simpler and cheaper.
* Individual callers can still use client-side batching for pipelining.
## Problem
It can take 3x the idle timeout to reap a channel. We have to wait for
the idle timeout to trigger first for the stream, then the client, then
the channel.
Touches #11735.
## Summary of changes
Reap empty channels immediately, and rely indirectly on the
channel/stream timeouts.
This can still lead to 2x the idle timeout for streams (first stream
then client), but that's okay -- if the stream closes abruptly (e.g. due
to timeout or error) we want to keep the client around in the pool for a
while.
## Problem
gRPC client retries currently include pool acquisition under the
per-attempt timeout. If pool acquisition is slow (e.g. full pool), this
will cause spurious timeout warnings, and the caller will lose its place
in the pool queue.
Touches #11735.
## Summary of changes
Makes several improvements to retries and related logic:
* Don't include pool acquisition time under request timeouts.
* Move attempt timeouts out of `Retry` and into the closure.
* Make `Retry` configurable, move constants into main module.
* Don't backoff on the first retry, and reduce initial/max backoffs to
5ms and 5s respectively.
* Add `with_retries` and `with_timeout` helpers.
* Add slow logging for pool acquisition, and a `warn_slow` counterpart
to `log_slow`.
* Add debug logging for requests and responses at the client boundary.
## Problem
With gRPC `GetPageRequest` batches, we'll have non-trivial
fragmentation/reassembly logic in several places of the stack
(concurrent reads, shard splits, LFC hits, etc). If we included the
block numbers with the pages in `GetPageResponse` we could have better
verification and observability that the final responses are correct.
Touches #11735.
Requires #12480.
## Summary of changes
Add a `Page` struct with`block_number` for `GetPageResponse`, along with
the `RelTag` for completeness, and verify them in the rich gRPC client.
## Problem
`GetPageRequest::request_id` is supposed to be a unique ID for a
request. It's not, because we may retry the request using the same ID.
This causes assertion failures and confusion.
Touches #11735.
Requires #12480.
## Summary of changes
Extend the request ID with a retry attempt, and handle it in the gRPC
client and server.
## Problem
We need to benchmark the rich gRPC client
`client_grpc::PageserverClient` against the basic, no-frills
`page_api::Client` to determine how much overhead it adds.
Touches #11735.
Requires #12476.
## Summary of changes
Add a `pagebench --rich-client` parameter to use
`client_grpc::PageserverClient`. Also adds a compression parameter to
the client.
## Problem
The communicator gRPC client must support changing the shard map on
splits.
Touches #11735.
Requires #12476.
## Summary of changes
* Wrap the shard set in a `ArcSwap` to allow swapping it out.
* Add a new `ShardSpec` parameter struct to pass validated shard info to
the client.
* Add `update_shards()` to change the shard set. In-flight requests are
allowed to complete using the old shards.
* Restructure `get_page` to use a stable view of the shard map, and
retry errors at the top (pre-split) level to pick up shard map changes.
* Also marks `tonic::Status::Internal` as non-retryable, so that we can
use it for client-side invariant checks without continually retrying
these.
## Problem
The gRPC client pools don't reap idle resources.
Touches #11735.
Requires #12475.
## Summary of changes
Reap idle pool resources (channels/clients/streams) after 3 minutes of
inactivity.
Also restructure the `StreamPool` to use a mutex rather than atomics for
synchronization, for simplicity. This will be optimized later.
## Problem
GetPage bulk requests such as prefetches and vacuum can head-of-line
block foreground requests, causing increased latency.
Touches #11735.
Requires #12469.
## Summary of changes
* Use dedicated channel/client/stream pools for bulk GetPage requests.
* Use lower concurrency but higher queue depth for bulk pools.
* Make pool limits configurable.
* Require unbounded client pool for stream pool, to avoid accidental
starvation.
## Problem
The rich gRPC Pageserver client needs to split GetPage batches that
straddle multiple shards.
Touches #11735.
Requires #12462.
## Summary of changes
Adds a `GetPageSplitter` which splits `GetPageRequest` that span
multiple shards, and then reassembles the responses. Dispatches
per-shard requests in parallel.
## Problem
For the communicator, we need a rich Pageserver gRPC client.
Touches #11735.
Requires #12434.
## Summary of changes
This patch adds an initial rich Pageserver gRPC client. It supports:
* Sharded tenants across multiple Pageservers.
* Pooling of connections, clients, and streams for efficient resource
use.
* Concurrent use by many callers.
* Internal handling of GetPage bidirectional streams, with pipelining
and error handling.
* Automatic retries.
* Observability.
The client is still under development. In particular, it needs GetPage
batch splitting, shard map updates, and performance optimization. This
will be addressed in follow-up PRs.
## Problem
The communicator will need gRPC channel/client/stream pools for
efficient reuse across many backends.
Touches #11735.
Requires #12396.
## Summary of changes
Adds three nested resource pools:
* `ChannelPool` for gRPC channels (i.e. TCP connections).
* `ClientPool` for gRPC clients (i.e. `page_api::Client`). Acquires
channels from `ChannelPool`.
* `StreamPool` for gRPC GetPage streams. Acquires clients from
`ClientPool`.
These are minimal functional implementations that will need further
improvements and performance optimization. However, the overall
structure is expected to be roughly final, so reviews should focus on
that.
The pools are not yet in use, but will form the foundation of a rich
gRPC Pageserver client used by the communicator (see #12462). This PR
also adds the initial crate scaffolding for that client.
See doc comments for details.
Not sure how verbose we want this to be in production, but for now,
more is better.
This shows that many tests are failing with errors like these:
PG:2025-07-01 23:02:34.311 GMT [1456523] LOG: [COMMUNICATOR] send_process_get_rel_size_request: got error status: NotFound, message: "Read error", details: [], metadata: MetadataMap { headers: {"content-type": "application/grpc", "date": "Tue, 01 Jul 2025 23:02:34 GMT"} }, retrying
I haven't debugged why that is yet. Did the compute make a bogus request?
