slon is the daemon application that "runs" Slony-I replication. A slon instance must be run for each node in a Slony-I cluster.
-d
log_level The log_level
specifies which levels of debugging messages
slon should display when logging its
activity.
The nine levels of logging are:
Fatal
Error
Warn
Config
Info
Debug1
Debug2
Debug3
Debug4
The first five non-debugging log levels (from Fatal to
Info) are always displayed in the logs. In
early versions of Slony-I, the "suggested"
log_level
value was 2, which would list output at
all levels down to debugging level 2. In Slony-I version 2, it
is recommended to set log_level
to 0; most of the
consistently interesting log information is generated at levels
higher than that.
-s
SYNC check interval The sync_interval
, measured in milliseconds,
indicates how often slon should check
to see if a SYNC should be introduced.
Default is 2000 ms. The main loop in
sync_Thread_main()
sleeps for intervals of
sync_interval
milliseconds between iterations.
Short sync check intervals keep the origin on a "short leash", updating its subscribers more frequently. If you have replicated sequences that are frequently updated without there being tables that are affected, this keeps there from being times when only sequences are updated, and therefore no syncs take place
If the node is not an origin for any replication set, so no
updates are coming in, it is somewhat wasteful for this value to
be much less the sync_interval_timeout
value.
-t
SYNC
interval timeout At the end of each sync_interval_timeout
timeout
period, a SYNC will be generated on the
"local" node even if there has been no replicable
data updated that would have caused a
SYNC to be generated.
If application activity ceases, whether because the
application is shut down, or because human users have gone home
and stopped introducing updates, the slon(1) will iterate away,
waking up every sync_interval
milliseconds, and,
as no updates are being made, no SYNC events
would be generated. Without this timeout parameter,
no SYNC events would be
generated, and it would appear that replication was falling
behind.
The sync_interval_timeout
value will lead
to eventually generating a SYNC, even though
there was no real replication work to be done. The lower that
this parameter is set, the more frequently slon(1) will generate
SYNC events when the application is not
generating replicable activity; this will have two effects:
The system will do more replication work.
(Of course, since there is no application load on the database, and no data to replicate, this load will be very easy to handle.
Replication will appear to be kept more "up to date."
(Of course, since there is no replicable activity going on, being "more up to date" is something of a mirage.)
Default is 10000 ms and maximum is 120000 ms. By default, you can expect each node to "report in" with a SYNC every 10 seconds.
Note that SYNC events are also generated on subscriber nodes. Since they are not actually generating any data to replicate to other nodes, these SYNC events are of not terribly much value.
-g
group size This controls the maximum SYNC group size,
sync_group_maxsize
; defaults to 6. Thus, if a
particular node is behind by 200 SYNCs, it
will try to group them together into groups of a maximum size of
sync_group_maxsize
. This can be expected to
reduce transaction overhead due to having fewer transactions to
COMMIT.
The default of 6 is probably suitable for small systems that can devote only very limited bits of memory to slon. If you have plenty of memory, it would be reasonable to increase this, as it will increase the amount of work done in each transaction, and will allow a subscriber that is behind by a lot to catch up more quickly.
Slon processes usually stay pretty small; even with large value for this option, slon would be expected to only grow to a few MB in size.
The big advantage in increasing this parameter comes from
cutting down on the number of transaction
COMMITs; moving from 1 to 2 will provide
considerable benefit, but the benefits will progressively fall
off once the transactions being processed get to be reasonably
large. There isn't likely to be a material difference in
performance between 80 and 90; at that point, whether
"bigger is better" will depend on whether the
bigger set of SYNCs makes the
LOG
cursor behave badly due to consuming more
memory and requiring more time to sortt.
In Slony-I version 1.0, slon will
always attempt to group SYNCs together to
this maximum, which won't be ideal if
replication has been somewhat destabilized by there being very
large updates (e.g. - a single transaction
that updates hundreds of thousands of rows) or by
SYNCs being disrupted on an origin node with
the result that there are a few SYNCs that
are very large. You might run into the problem that grouping
together some very large SYNCs knocks over a
slon process. When it picks up
again, it will try to process the same large grouped set of
SYNCs, and run into the same problem over and
over until an administrator interrupts this and changes the
-g
value to break this "deadlock."
In Slony-I version 1.1 and later versions, the slon instead adaptively "ramps up" from doing 1 SYNC at a time towards the maximum group size. As a result, if there are a couple of SYNCs that cause problems, the slon will (with any relevant watchdog assistance) always be able to get to the point where it processes the troublesome SYNCs one by one, hopefully making operator assistance unnecessary.
-o
desired sync timeA "maximum" time planned for grouped SYNCs.
If replication is running behind, slon will gradually
increase the numbers of SYNCs grouped
together, targetting that (based on the time taken for the
last group of SYNCs) they
shouldn't take more than the specified
desired_sync_time
value.
The default value for desired_sync_time
is
60000ms, equal to one minute.
That way, you can expect (or at least hope!) that you'll get a COMMIT roughly once per minute.
It isn't totally predictable, as it is entirely possible for someone to request a very large update, all as one transaction, that can "blow up" the length of the resulting SYNC to be nearly arbitrarily long. In such a case, the heuristic will back off for the next group.
The overall effect is to improve Slony-I's ability to cope with variations in traffic. By starting with 1 SYNC, and gradually moving to more, even if there turn out to be variations large enough to cause PostgreSQL backends to crash, Slony-I will back off down to start with one sync at a time, if need be, so that if it is at all possible for replication to progress, it will.
-c
cleanup cycles The value vac_frequency
indicates how often to
VACUUM in cleanup cycles.
Set this to zero to disable
slon-initiated vacuuming. If you are
using something like pg_autovacuum to
initiate vacuums, you may not need for slon to initiate vacuums
itself. If you are not, there are some tables
Slony-I uses that collect a
lot of dead tuples that should be vacuumed
frequently, notably pg_listener
.
In Slony-I version 1.1, this changes a little; the
cleanup thread tracks, from iteration to iteration, the earliest
transaction ID still active in the system. If this doesn't
change, from one iteration to the next, then an old transaction
is still active, and therefore a VACUUM will
do no good. The cleanup thread instead merely does an
ANALYZE on these tables to update the
statistics in pg_statistics
.
-p
PID filename pid_file
contains the filename in which the PID
(process ID) of the slon is stored.
This may make it easier to construct scripts to monitor multiple slon processes running on a single host.
-f
config fileFile from which to read slon configuration.
This configuration is discussed further in Slon Run-time Configuration. If there are to be a complex set of configuration parameters, or if there are parameters you do not wish to be visible in the process environment variables (such as passwords), it may be convenient to draw many or all parameters from a configuration file. You might either put common parameters for all slon processes in a commonly-used configuration file, allowing the command line to specify little other than the connection info. Alternatively, you might create a configuration file for each node.
-a
archive directory archive_dir
indicates a directory in which to
place a sequence of SYNC archive files for
use in log shipping mode.
-x
command to run on log archive command_on_logarchive
indicates a command to be run
each time a SYNC file is successfully generated.
See more details on slon_conf_command_on_log_archive.
-q
quit based on SYNC provider quit_sync_provider
indicates which provider's
worker thread should be watched in order to terminate after a
certain event. This must be used in conjunction with the
-r
option below...
This allows you to have a slon stop replicating after a certain point.
-r
quit at event number quit_sync_finalsync
indicates the event number
after which the remote worker thread for the provider above
should terminate. This must be used in conjunction with the
-q
option above...
-l
lag interval lag_interval
indicates an interval value such as
3 minutes or 4 hours
or 2 days that indicates that this node is
to lag its providers by the specified interval of time. This
causes events to be ignored until they reach the age
corresponding to the interval.
![]() | There is a concommittant downside to this lag; events that require all nodes to synchronize, as typically happens with SLONIK FAILOVER(7) and SLONIK MOVE SET(7), will have to wait for this lagging node. That might not be ideal behaviour at failover time, or at the time when you want to run SLONIK EXECUTE SCRIPT(7). |
slon returns 0 to the shell if it
finished normally. It returns via exit(-1)
(which will likely provide a return value of either 127 or 255,
depending on your system) if it encounters any fatal error.