The first and main issue was that we were putting absolute pointers into
shared memory for the `steps` field of the `ProgressMonitorData`. This
pointer was being overwritten every time a process requested the monitor
steps, which is the only reason why this even worked in the first place.
To quote a part of a relevant stack overflow answer:
> First of all, putting absolute pointers in shared memory segments is
> terrible terible idea - those pointers would only be valid in the
> process that filled in their values. Shared memory segments are not
> guaranteed to attach at the same virtual address in every process.
> On the contrary - they attach where the system deems it possible when
> `shmaddr == NULL` is specified on call to `shmat()`
Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10781921/2570866
In this case a race condition occurred when a second process overwrote
the pointer in between the first process its write and read of the steps
field.
This issue is fixed by not storing the pointer in shared memory anymore.
Instead we now calculate it's position every time we need it.
The second race condition I have not been able to trigger, but I found
it while investigating this. This issue was that we published the handle
of the shared memory segment, before we initialized the data in the
steps. This means that during initialization of the data, a call to
`get_rebalance_progress()` could read partial data in an unsynchronized
manner.
This change adds a general purpose infrastructure to log and monitor
process about long running progresses. It uses
`pg_stat_get_progress_info` infrastructure, introduced with PostgreSQL
9.6 and used for tracking `VACUUM` commands.
This patch only handles the creation of a memory space in dynamic shared
memory, putting its info in `pg_stat_get_progress_info`, fetching the
progress monitors on demand and finalizing the progress tracking.
Onder Kalaci
Jelte Fennema
Philip Dubé
SaitTalhaNisanci
Philip Dubé
Murat Tuncer
Eren Başak