741d7f1047
We've long contended with isolation test results that aren't entirely stable. Some test scripts insert long delays to try to force stable results, which is not terribly desirable; but other erratic failure modes remain, causing unrepeatable buildfarm failures. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to solve this by improving the server-side support code, without much success: that way is fundamentally unable to cope with diffs that stem from chance ordering of arrival of messages from different server processes. We can improve matters on the client side, however, by annotating the test scripts themselves to show the desired reporting order of events that might occur in different orders. This patch adds three types of annotations to deal with (a) test steps that might or might not complete their waits before the isolationtester can see them waiting; (b) test steps in different sessions that can legitimately complete in either order; and (c) NOTIFY messages that might arrive before or after the completion of a step in another session. We might need more annotation types later, but this seems to be enough to deal with the instabilities we've seen in the buildfarm. It also lets us get rid of all the long delays that were previously used, cutting more than a minute off the runtime of the isolation tests. Back-patch to all supported branches, because the buildfarm instabilities affect all the branches, and because it seems desirable to keep isolationtester's capabilities the same across all branches to simplify possible future back-patching of tests. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/327948.1623725828@sss.pgh.pa.us
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.