Wake WALSender to reduce data loss at failover for async commit.

simonat2ndQuadrant · simonat2ndQuadrant · commit 090e8a984cf1 · 2012-06-07T19:26:03.000+01:00
WALSender now woken up after each background flush by WALwriter, avoiding
multi-second replication delay for an all-async commit workload.
Replication delay reduced from 7s with default settings to 200ms, allowing
significantly reduced data loss at failover.

Andres Freund and Simon Riggs
diff --git a/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c b/src/backend/access/transam/xlog.c
@@ -2115,6 +2115,7 @@ XLogBackgroundFlush(void)
 {
 	XLogRecPtr	WriteRqstPtr;
 	bool		flexible = true;
+	bool		wrote_something = false;
 
 	/* XLOG doesn't need flushing during recovery */
 	if (RecoveryInProgress())
@@ -2183,10 +2184,18 @@ XLogBackgroundFlush(void)
 		WriteRqst.Write = WriteRqstPtr;
 		WriteRqst.Flush = WriteRqstPtr;
 		XLogWrite(WriteRqst, flexible, false);
+		wrote_something = true;
 	}
 	LWLockRelease(WALWriteLock);
 
 	END_CRIT_SECTION();
+
+	/*
+	 * If we wrote something then we have something to send to standbys also,
+	 * otherwise the replication delay become around 7s with just async commit.
+	 */
+	if (wrote_something)
+		WalSndWakeup();
 }
 
 /*
