When Citus needs to parallelize queries on the local node (e.g., the node
executing the distributed query and the shards are the same), we need to
be mindful about the connection management. The reason is that the client
backends that are running distributed queries are competing with the client
backends that Citus initiates to parallelize the queries in order to get
a slot on the max_connections.
In that regard, we implemented a "failover" mechanism where if the distributed
queries cannot get a connection, the execution failovers the tasks to the local
execution.
The failover logic is follows:
- As the connection manager if it is OK to get a connection
- If yes, we are good.
- If no, we fail the workerPool and the failure triggers
the failover of the tasks to local execution queue
The decision of getting a connection is follows:
/*
* For local nodes, solely relying on citus.max_shared_pool_size or
* max_connections might not be sufficient. The former gives us
* a preview of the future (e.g., we let the new connections to establish,
* but they are not established yet). The latter gives us the close to
* precise view of the past (e.g., the active number of client backends).
*
* Overall, we want to limit both of the metrics. The former limit typically
* kics in under regular loads, where the load of the database increases in
* a reasonable pace. The latter limit typically kicks in when the database
* is issued lots of concurrent sessions at the same time, such as benchmarks.
*/
With this patch, we introduce `locally_reserved_shared_connections.c/h` files
which are responsible for reserving some space in shared memory counters
upfront.
We sometimes need to reserve connections, but not necessarily
establish them. For example:
- COPY command should reserve connections as it cannot know which
connections it needs in which order. COPY establishes connections
as any input data hits the workers. For example, for router COPY
command, it only establishes 1 connection.
As discussed here (https://github.com/citusdata/citus/pull/3849#pullrequestreview-431792473),
COPY needs to reserve connections up-front, otherwise we can end
up with resource starvation/un-detected deadlocks.
We initially considered removing entries just before any change to
pg_dist_node. However, that ended-up being very complex and making
MX even more complex.
Instead, we're switching to a simpler solution, where we remove entries
when the counter gets to 0.
With certain workloads, this may have some performance penalty. But, two
notes on that:
- When counter == 0, it implies that the cluster is not busy
- With cached connections, that's not possible
With this commit, we're introducing a new infrastructure to throttle
connections to the worker nodes. This infrastructure is useful for
multi-shard queries, router queries are have not been affected by this.
The goal is to prevent establishing more than citus.max_shared_pool_size
number of connections per worker node in total, across sessions.
To do that, we've introduced a new connection flag OPTIONAL_CONNECTION.
The idea is that some connections are optional such as the second
(and further connections) for the adaptive executor. A single connection
is enough to finish the distributed execution, the others are useful to
execute the query faster. Thus, they can be consider as optional connections.
When an optional connection is not allowed to the adaptive executor, it
simply skips it and continues the execution with the already established
connections. However, it'll keep retrying to establish optional
connections, in case some slots are open again.
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