Part of https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/2239
Regular, from scratch, timeline creation involves initdb to be run in a separate directory, data from this directory to be imported into pageserver and, finally, timeline-related background tasks to start.
This PR ensures we don't leave behind any directories that are not marked as temporary and that pageserver removes such directories on restart, allowing timeline creation to be retried with the same IDs, if needed.
It would be good to later rewrite the logic to use a temporary directory, similar what tenant creation does.
Yet currently it's harder than this change, so not done.
Instead of spawning helper threads, we now use Tokio tasks. There
are multiple Tokio runtimes, for different kinds of tasks. One for
serving libpq client connections, another for background operations
like GC and compaction, and so on. That's not strictly required, we
could use just one runtime, but with this you can still get an
overview of what's happening with "top -H".
There's one subtle behavior in how TenantState is updated. Before this
patch, if you deleted all timelines from a tenant, its GC and
compaction loops were stopped, and the tenant went back to Idle
state. We no longer do that. The empty tenant stays Active. The
changes to test_tenant_tasks.py are related to that.
There's still plenty of synchronous code and blocking. For example, we
still use blocking std::io functions for all file I/O, and the
communication with WAL redo processes is still uses low-level unix
poll(). We might want to rewrite those later, but this will do for
now. The model is that local file I/O is considered to be fast enough
that blocking - and preventing other tasks running in the same thread -
is acceptable.
`latest_gc_cutoff_lsn` tracks the cutoff point where GC has been
performed. Anything older than the cutoff might already have been GC'd
away, and cannot be queried by get_page_at_lsn requests. It's
protected by an RWLock. Whenever a get_page_at_lsn requests comes in,
it first grabs the lock and reads the current `latest_gc_cutoff`, and
holds the lock it until the request has been served. The lock ensures
that GC doesn't start concurrently and remove page versions that we
still need to satisfy the request.
With the lock, get_page_at_lsn request could potentially be blocked
for a long time. GC only holds the lock in exclusive mode for a short
duration, but depending on how whether the RWLock is "fair", a read
request might be queued behind the GC's exclusive request, which in
turn might be queued behind a long-running read operation, like a
basebackup. If the lock implementation is not fair, i.e. if a reader
can always jump the queue if the lock is already held in read mode,
then another problem arises: GC might be starved if a constant stream
of GetPage requests comes in.
To avoid the long wait or starvation, introduce a Read-Copy-Update
mechanism to replace the lock on `latest_gc_cutoff_lsn`. With the RCU,
reader can always read the latest value without blocking (except for a
very short duration if the lock protecting the RCU is contended;
that's comparable to a spinlock). And a writer can always write a new
value without waiting for readers to finish using the old value. The
old readers will continue to see the old value through their guard
object, while new readers will see the new value.
This is purely theoretical ATM, we don't have any reports of either
starvation or blocking behind GC happening in practice. But it's
simple to fix, so let's nip that problem in the bud.
