On Tue, Apr 30, 2019 at 7:14 PM Thomas Munro <thomas.mu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it'd be nice to have a set of macros that can create wait > points in the C code that isolation tests can control, in a special > build. Perhaps there could be shm hash table of named wait points in > shared memory; if DEBUG_WAIT_POINT("foo") finds that "foo" is not > present, it continues, but if it finds an entry it waits for it to go > away. Then isolation tests could add/remove names and signal a > condition variable to release waiters. > > I contemplated that while working on SKIP LOCKED, which had a bunch of > weird edge cases that I tested by inserting throw-away wait-point code > like this: > > > https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CADLWmXXss83oiYD0pn_SfQfg%2ByNEpPbPvgDb8w6Fh--jScSybA%40mail.gmail.com > > Yes, I agree it would be nice to have a framework like this. Greenplum actually has a fault injection framework that, I believe, works similarly to what you are describing -- i.e. sets a variable in shared memory. There is an extension, gp_inject_fault, which allows you to set the faults. Andreas Scherbaum wrote a blog post about how to use it [1]. The Greenplum implementation is not documented particularly well in the code, but, it is something that folks working on Greenplum have talked about modifying and proposing to Postgres. [1] http://engineering.pivotal.io/post/testing_greenplum_database_using_fault_injection/ -- Melanie Plageman