This commit is the second and last phase of dropping PG13 support.
It consists of the following:
- Removes all PG_VERSION_13 & PG_VERSION_14 from codepaths
- Removes pg_version_compat entries and columnar_version_compat entries
specific for PG13
- Removes alternative pg13 test outputs
- Removes PG13 normalize lines and fix the test outputs based on that
It is a continuation of 5bf163a27d
Using binary encoding can save a lot of CPU cycles, both on the sender
and on the receiver. Since the walsender and walreceiver processes are
single threaded, this can matter a lot for the throughput if they are
bottlenecked on CPU.
This feature is only available in PG14, not PG13. It should be safe to
always enable because it's only used for types that support binary
encoding according to the PG docs:
> Even when this option is enabled, only data types that have binary
> send and receive functions will be transferred in binary.
But in case it causes problems, it can still be disabled by setting
`citus.enable_binary_protocol` to `false`.
**Intro**
This adds support to Citus to change the CPU priority values of
backends. This is created with two main usecases in mind:
1. Users might want to run the logical replication part of the shard moves
or shard splits at a higher speed than they would do by themselves.
This might cause some small loss of DB performance for their regular
queries, but this is often worth it. During high load it's very possible
that the logical replication WAL sender is not able to keep up with the
WAL that is generated. This is especially a big problem when the
machine is close to running out of disk when doing a rebalance.
2. Users might have certain long running queries that they don't impact
their regular workload too much.
**Be very careful!!!**
Using CPU priorities to control scheduling can be helpful in some cases
to control which processes are getting more CPU time than others.
However, due to an issue called "[priority inversion][1]" it's possible that
using CPU priorities together with the many locks that are used within
Postgres cause the exact opposite behavior of what you intended. This
is why this PR only allows the PG superuser to change the CPU priority
of its own processes. Currently it's not recommended to set `citus.cpu_priority`
directly. Currently the only recommended interface for users is the setting
called `citus.cpu_priority_for_logical_replication_senders`. This setting
controls CPU priority for a very limited set of processes (the logical
replication senders). So, the dangers of priority inversion are also limited
with when using it for this usecase.
**Background**
Before reading the rest it's important to understand some basic
background regarding process CPU priorities, because they are a bit
counter intuitive. A lower priority value, means that the process will
be scheduled more and whatever it's doing will thus complete faster. The
default priority for processes is 0. Valid values are from -20 to 19
inclusive. On Linux a larger difference between values of two processes
will result in a bigger difference in percentage of scheduling.
**Handling the usecases**
Usecase 1 can be achieved by setting `citus.cpu_priority_for_logical_replication_senders`
to the priority value that you want it to have. It's necessary to set
this both on the workers and the coordinator. Example:
```
citus.cpu_priority_for_logical_replication_senders = -10
```
Usecase 2 can with this PR be achieved by running the following as
superuser. Note that this is only possible as superuser currently
due to the dangers mentioned in the "Be very carefull!!!" section.
And although this is possible it's **NOT** recommended:
```sql
ALTER USER background_job_user SET citus.cpu_priority = 5;
```
**OS configuration**
To actually make these settings work well it's important to run Postgres
with more a more permissive value for the 'nice' resource limit than
Linux will do by default. By default Linux will not allow a process to
set its priority lower than it currently is, even if it was lower when
the process originally started. This capability is necessary to reset
the CPU priority to its original value after a transaction finishes.
Depending on how you run Postgres this needs to be done in one of two
ways:
If you use systemd to start Postgres all you have to do is add a line
like this to the systemd service file:
```conf
LimitNice=+0 # the + is important, otherwise its interpreted incorrectly as 20
```
If that's not the case you'll have to configure `/etc/security/limits.conf`
like so, assuming that you are running Postgres as the `postgres` OS user:
```
postgres soft nice 0
postgres hard nice 0
```
Finally you'd have add the following line to `/etc/pam.d/common-session`
```
session required pam_limits.so
```
These settings would allow to change the priority back after setting it
to a higher value.
However, to actually allow you to set priorities even lower than the
default priority value you would need to change the values in the
config to something lower than 0. So for example:
```conf
LimitNice=-10
```
or
```
postgres soft nice -10
postgres hard nice -10
```
If you use WSL2 you'll likely have to do another thing. You have to
open a new shell, because when PAM is only used during login, and
WSL2 doesn't actually log you in. You can force a login like this:
```
sudo su $USER --shell /bin/bash
```
Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/68322992/2570866
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priority_inversion
Naisila Puka
Ahmet Gedemenli
Jelte Fennema