Why we love pgpooland why hate it!

Sameer Kumar (@sameerkasi200x)

Sr. Solution Architect, Ashnik (@AshnikBiz)

About Me!

• A Random guy who started Career as an Oracle and DB2 DBA (and yeah a bit of SQL Server too)

• Then moved to ‘Ashnik’ and started working with Postgres

• We work on Open Source Consulting and Solution

• And now I love Open Source!

• I also work on• Backend solution for Mobile App• Web Infrastructure• Docker and Containers

• Twitter - @sameerkasi200x

• Apart from technology I love cycling and photography

What am I going to talk?

• What is pgpool?

• What got us hooked to pgpool?

• What architectures we deployed with pgpool?

• Issues we run into• Some diagnostics and resolutions

• Some tips?

• IMHO, when not to use pgpool?

What got us hooked to pgpool?

What is pgpool?

• pgpool-II is a middleware

• Works between PostgreSQL servers and a PostgreSQL database client

• Licensed under BSD license

pgpool is Swiss Army knife for PostgreSQL!

• It offers various features• Connection Pooling

• Replication

• Load Balancing

• Limiting Exceeding Connections

• Parallel Query (deprecated)

Connection Pooling

• pgpool-II saves connections to the PostgreSQL servers

• reuse them when a new connection with the same properties

• It reduces connection overhead, and improves system's overall throughput

Replication

• pgpool-II can manage multiple PostgreSQL servers

• Using the replication function enables creating a realtimebackup on 2 or more physical disks

Load Balancing

Load Balancing

• Read query is automatically load balanced

• pgpool can detect failover and start sending Read/write to surviving node

• It can also be used to run a failover command to promote standby upon failure of master

Watchdog Mode

Limiting Exceeding Connections a.k.a Connection Queuing

• In PostgreSQL connections after max_connections are rejected

• pgpool-II also has a limit on the maximum number of connection

• Extra connections will be queued

What got us hooked to pgpool?

• It understands the PostgreSQL wire protocol and has Postgres query parser?

• In plain English it means• You don’t have to do major changes in your application to use features

like load balancing and connections pooling.

• Most of the times you can use it with pgpool literally unchanged

• Makes it perfect• While scaling after development

• Using packaged application

We really started loving it!

• More stand-by servers can be added and pgpool can be configured for load balancing across more nodes in runtime

• Works in tandem with Virtualization and Provisioning on the fly

• Has in-built capability for HA with Watchdog

Architectures we deployed with pgpool?

Streaming Replication – Master Slave

Streaming Replication – with Load Balancing

Load Balancing – with third party failover solution

Load Balancing with pgpool Watchdog– a.k.a. NoSPoF

Pgpool tied with Application Servers

Issues we faced!

Does not work very well with application connection pooling!

An I/O error occured while sending to the backend.

A PooledConnection that has already signalled a Connection error is still in use

com.edb.util.PSQLException: This connection has been closed.

• Occurs when a connection was idle in your application pool but was closed by pgpool

• Also when using application connection pooling, less changes of pgpool’s connection pool being useful

It is not guaranteed that pooled connections will be used

• In pgpool connections are pooled by child processes

• Each child process can pool multiple connections if they have different user-db combination

• When pgpool receives a request it assigns it to any child – “any child” randomly

• It is not guaranteed that a child pooling a relevant connection will receive request

We hit several issues and known bugs over 6 months

connect_inet_domain_socket: select() interrupted

pid 22001: die: close listen socket

pcp_child: pcp_read() failed. reason: Success

pcp_child: authentication failed

an error message: ERROR: unable to read data from frontend DETAIL: EOF encountered with frontend

Logging is not really best for someone who has not looked at the code

pid 22001: die: close listen socket

pcp_child: pcp_read() failed. reason: Success

health_check: health check timer has been already expired before attempting to connect to 1 th backend

Split Brain in Master Slave configuration

• False promotion of the Standby node during a network split

• No way to define quorum or voting before deciding to promote

• No auto reconfiguration of replication if you have multiple standby

You can not use pg_terminate_backend()

• pg_terminate_backend sends a signal back to the client, which is very similar to response sent when server is being shutdown

• pgpool uses the response from Server on connections determine it’s health

• pg_terminate_backend

No way to poll lost nodes automatically

• If a node is removed from pgpool, there is no check done by pgpool to check if it is ready again

• A periodic check to check if the same node is available again, would be nice

• This is specially good when you use a separate tool for failovers • Imagine when failover did not happen but pgpool thought master has

gone down

Connection restart upon node failure

2016-08-13 03:17:20 LOG: pid 8662: health_check: health check timer has been already expired before attempting to connect to 1 th backend

2016-08-13 03:17:20 LOG: pid 8662: set 1 th backend down status

2016-08-13 03:17:20 LOG: pid 8662: wd_start_interlock: start interlocking

2016-08-13 03:17:20 LOG: pid 8662: starting degeneration. shutdown host 172.163.169.150(5432)

2016-08-13 03:17:20 LOG: pid 8662: Restart all children

.

.

2016-08-13 03:17:34 LOG: pid 16338: pcp child process received restart request

2016-08-13 03:17:34 LOG: pid 8662: PCP child 16338 exits with status 256 in failover()

2016-08-13 03:17:34 LOG: pid 8662: fork a new PCP child pid 5133 in failover()

2016-08-13 03:18:11 LOG: pid 9204: worker process received restart request

Time skew can lead to issues in Watchdog mode

• pgpool exchanges UDP messages to keep a tab on other health of other pgpoolnodes

• These UDP messages contain timestamp

• If server time deviates or gets synchronized, there is a chance that pgpool will discard messages thinking it is from past

(!WD_TIME_ISSET(node->hb_send_time) ||WD_TIME_BEFORE(node->hb_send_time, pkt.send_time)){ereport(DEBUG1,(errmsg("received heartbeat signal from \"%s:%d\"",from, from_pgpool_port)));

node->hb_send_time = pkt.send_time;node->hb_last_recv_time = tv;}else{ereport(NOTICE,(errmsg("received heartbeat signal is older than the latest, ignored")));

Some tips!

• When running in Virtual Environment reserve the resource for Virtual Machine – i.e. no ballooning

• Make sure your pgpool timeout for node failover are higher than the failover

• Make sure you understand the authentication flow define pg_hba and pool_hba rule accordingly• Application --- AUTHENTICATES AGAINST pgpool --- AUTHENTICATES AGAINST PostgreSQL

• There are few hidden (not documented) checks that are done by pgpool• good to allow connections from pgpool to PostgreSQL for system

database e.g. postgres, template0 etc

Some tips while running pgpool

• Ensure that your servers hosting pgpool are in synchronized for their time

• pgpool timeout for node failover > than max time lag allowed / time sync frequency in your environment

• Use a different user for pgpool health check – with read only permissions/restrictions

• Learn to use pcp_* commands – manually and with your failover tool

Some more tips

• You have huge number of connections – any node failure can lead to restart of connections leading to a disconnection

• When you want to use it just for connection pooling – use pgbouncer instead

• When you want lost nodes to join back automatically

• When you are operating in a network where latency and QoS is not guaranteed

• You want queries to continue during a failure

• When you want to use it with different DB clusters

IMHO pgpool is not best when

Twitter - @sameerkasi200x | @ashnikbiz

Email - sameer.kumar@ashnik.com | success@ashnik.com

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/samkumar150288

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