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From: Phillip Diffley <[email protected]>
To: Christophe Pettus <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Replication slot WAL reservation
Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2025 16:27:58 -0500
Message-ID: <CAGAwPgTVG_0X9Y9UOFFYcOBDmmo9k6NGb_gJn0Zk=6pRng_=0A@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <CAGAwPgR=B9VTDwKkHZRHjYTmQzvJ+30mK-uyc7MMw6Tf9s9Fsw@mail.gmail.com>
	<[email protected]>

Oh I see! I was conflating the data I see coming out of a replication slot
with the internal organization of the WAL. I think the more specific
question I am trying to answer is, as a consumer of a replication slot, how
do I reason about what replication records will be made unavailable when I
confirm an LSN? Here I am worried about situations where the replication
connection is interrupted or the program processing the records crashes,
and we need to replay records that may have been previously sent but were
not fully processed.

For example, are the records sent by a replication slot always sent in the
same order such that if I advance the confirmed_flush_lsn of a slot to the
LSN of record "A", I will know that any records that had been streamed
after record "A" will be replayable?


On Tue, Mar 25, 2025 at 12:14 PM Christophe Pettus <[email protected]> wrote:

> Missed this question!
>
> > On Mar 25, 2025, at 09:56, Phillip Diffley <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > But when processing data from a replication slot, we confirm rows that
> have been processed and can be deleted from the WAL based on the LSN (eg.
> with pg_replication_slot_advance). How does postgres identify what parts of
> the WAL can be freed?
>
> Basically, if no part of the system "needs" a particular LSN position, the
> segments that include that LSN position and earlier can be free.
>
> The various things that can "need" a particular LSN point are:
>
> 1. Replication slots, if the other side has not confirmed that it has
> received it (under whatever synchronous commit rules that slot is operating
> under).
> 2. The wal_keep_size setting.
> 3. The max_wal_size setting.
> 4. The archive_command, if a WAL segment hasn't been successfully archived
> yet.
>
> One thing to remember is that the WAL does *not* contain contiguous blocks
> of operations for a single transaction.  The operations are written to the
> WAL by every session as they do operations, so the WAL is a jumble of
> different transactions.  One of the jobs of the logical replication
> framework is to sort that out so it can present only the operations that
> belong to committed transactions to the output plugin.  (This is why
> there's an internal structure called the "reorder buffer": it reorders WAL
> operations into transaction blocks.)

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