Sometimes our CI randomly fails on a test in a way similar to this:
```diff
step s2-drop:
DROP TABLE cancel_table;
-
+ <waiting ...>
+step s2-drop: <... completed>
starting permutation: s1-timeout s1-begin s1-sleep10000 s1-rollback s1-reset s1-drop
```
Source: https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/citusdata/citus/26524/workflows/5415b84f-13a3-482f-bef9-648314c79a67/jobs/756377
I tried to fix that already in #6252 by disabling the maintenance daemon
during isolation tests. But it seems that hasn't fixed all cases of
these errors. This is another attempt at fixing these issues that seems
to have better results.
What it does is that it starts using the pInterestingPids parameter that
citus_isolation_test_session_is_blocked receives. With this change we
start filter out processes that are not children of any of the global
pids.
This approach works for almost all of our isolation tests, but not for
all of them. For the ones where it doesn't work I use a GUC to fall back
to the old behaviour which checks all blocks.
Use Citus helper UDFs by default in iso tests
PostgreSQL isolation test infrastructure uses some UDFs to detect
whether concurrent sessions block each other. Citus implements
alternatives to that UDF so that we are able to detect and report
distributed transactions that get blocked on the worker nodes as well.
We needed to explicitly replace PG helper functions with Citus
implementations in each isolation file. Now we replace them by default.
Do not obtain AccessShareLock before acquiring the distributed locks.
Acquiring an AccessShareLock ensures that the relations which we are trying to get a distributed lock on will not be dropped in the time between when the LOCK command is issued and the LOCK commands are send to the worker. However, this also leads to distributed deadlocks in such scenarios:
```sql
-- for dist lock acquiring order coor, w1, w2
-- on w2
LOCK t1 IN ACCESS EXLUSIVE MODE;
-- acquire AccessShareLock locally on t1 to ensure it is not dropped while we get ready to distribute the lock
-- concurrently on w1
LOCK t1 IN ACCESS EXLUSIVE MODE;
-- acquire AccessShareLock locally on t1 to ensure it is not dropped while we get ready to distribute the lock
-- acquire dist lock on coor, w1, gets blocked on local AccessShareLock on w2
-- on w2 continuation of the execution above
-- starts to acquire dist locks and gets blocked on the coor by the lock acquired by w1
-- distributed deadlock
```
We opt for avoiding such deadlocks with the cost of the possibility of running into errors when the relations on which we are trying to acquire locks on get dropped.
Jelte Fennema
Hanefi Onaldi
Gledis Zeneli
gledis69