Up to now, committing a transaction has caused CurrentMemoryContext to get set to TopMemoryContext. Most callers did not pay any particular heed to this, which is problematic because TopMemoryContext is a long-lived context that never gets reset. If the caller assumes it can leak memory because it's running in a limited-lifespan context, that behavior translates into a session-lifespan memory leak. The first-reported instance of this involved ProcessIncomingNotify, which is called from the main processing loop that normally runs in MessageContext. That outer-loop code assumes that whatever it allocates will be cleaned up when we're done processing the current client message --- but if we service a notify interrupt, then whatever gets allocated before the next switch to MessageContext will be permanently leaked in TopMemoryContext. sinval catchup interrupts have a similar problem, and I strongly suspect that some places in logical replication do too. To fix this in a generic way, let's redefine the behavior as "CommitTransactionCommand restores the memory context that was current at entry to StartTransactionCommand". This clearly fixes the issue for the notify and sinval cases, and it seems to match the mental model that's in use in the logical replication code, to the extent that anybody thought about it there at all. For consistency, likewise make subtransaction exit restore the context that was current at subtransaction start (rather than always selecting the CurTransactionContext of the parent transaction level). This case has less risk of resulting in a permanent leak than the outer-level behavior has, but it would not meet the principle of least surprise for some CommitTransactionCommand calls to restore the previous context while others don't. While we're here, also change xact.c so that we reset TopTransactionContext at transaction exit and then re-use it in later transactions, rather than dropping and recreating it in each cycle. This probably doesn't save a lot given the context recycling mechanism in aset.c, but it should save a little bit. Per suggestion from David Rowley. (Parenthetically, the text in src/backend/utils/mmgr/README implies that this is how I'd planned to implement it as far back as commit 1aebc3618 --- but the code actually added in that commit just drops and recreates it each time.) This commit also cleans up a few places outside xact.c that were needlessly making TopMemoryContext current, and thus risking more leaks of the same kind. I don't think any of them represent significant leak risks today, but let's deal with them while the issue is top-of-mind. Per bug #18512 from wizardbrony. Commit to HEAD only, as this change seems to have some risk of breaking things for some callers. We'll apply a narrower fix for the known-broken cases in the back branches. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/3478884.1718656625@sss.pgh.pa.us
PostgreSQL Database Management System
This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL database management system.
PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions. This distribution also contains C language bindings.
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