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pg_rewind does not rewind diverging timelines
- Jump to comment-1Mats Kindahl<mats.kindahl@gmail.com>Apr 30, 2026, 8:19 AM UTCHi all,
I have been playing around with various promotion scenarios to check if it
is possible to lose writes in more complicated scenarios involving
promotions and uses of synchronousstandbynames and decided to create a
TLA+ model for streaming replication involving promotions and check those
with TLC. You can find the models at [1] if you're interested.
There is one scenario that I assume is known that TLC found, but does not
seem to be fixed. It is a relatively rare case, but since the fix is quite
easy, I thought I'd share it with you and get feedback.
The scenario can occur if you're unlucky and have more than one crash when
promoting standbys to be primaries, and goes like this:
You have three servers, S1, S2, and S3. S1 is primary and S2 and S3 are
standbys. All are on timeline (TLI) 1.
1. S1 crashes
2. S1 recovers and starts promotion. It writes XLOGENDOF_RECOVERY (EOR)
for TLI 2 to the WAL.
3. S1 It manages to write some records W1 to the WAL.
4. Before the EOR is replicated to any standby, S1 crashes again. It is now
on TLI 2 and has some changes that are not elsewhere.
5. S2 is promoted. It writes an EOR for TLI 2 (since it is not aware of any
other timeline) to the WAL.
6. S2 writes some records W2 to WAL and now S1 has a record of TLI 2
version 1 (TLI 2.1) and S2 is on TLI 2.2.
7. S1 recovers and wants to join as a standby. You run pg_rewind to get rid
of the extra data, but since S2 is also on TLI 2, pg_rewind will happily
assume that both are on the same timeline.
8. S2 is now a standby but has that extra record for W2 both in the WAL and
in the database.
The fix (see attached draft) is quite simple: add a UUID to the EOR and to
the history file. When comparing timelines, don't only check the TLI, also
check the UUID. If not both match, go back further until you find a
timeline where both the TLI and the timeline UUID matches and do the usual
fandango to find the good LSN to rewind to.
[1]: https://github.com/mkindahl/tla-postgres