Thanks, Alvaro, Yes indeed. I have a test that causes the deadlock almost immediately. I have upgraded to 9.3.6 and have been running for a few hours now w/o deadlock errors observed. Dmitry ________________________________________ From: Alvaro Herrera [alvherre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2015 6:19 AM To: Dmitry O Litvintsev Cc: pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: postgresql93-9.3.5: deadlock when updating parent table expected? Dmitry O Litvintsev wrote: > Hi, > > I recently updated to postgresql93-9.3.5 (from 9.2.9). I see frequent deadlocks > when updating parent table in insert into child table. There is foreign key constraint between > child table and parent table. Parent table is updated on by trigger in insert into child table. So > pretty much standard thing. Is it expected to deadlock? This is probably caused by a bug that was fixed in 9.3.6: Author: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Branch: master [0e5680f47] 2014-12-26 13:52:27 -0300 Branch: REL9_4_STABLE Release: REL9_4_1 [0e3a1f71d] 2014-12-26 13:52:27 -0300 Branch: REL9_3_STABLE Release: REL9_3_6 [048912386] 2014-12-26 13:52:27 -0300 Grab heavyweight tuple lock only before sleeping We were trying to acquire the lock even when we were subsequently not sleeping in some other transaction, which opens us up unnecessarily to deadlocks. In particular, this is troublesome if an update tries to lock an updated version of a tuple and finds itself doing EvalPlanQual update chain walking; more than two sessions doing this concurrently will find themselves sleeping on each other because the HW tuple lock acquisition in heap_lock_tuple called from EvalPlanQualFetch races with the same tuple lock being acquired in heap_update -- one of these sessions sleeps on the other one to finish while holding the tuple lock, and the other one sleeps on the tuple lock. Per trouble report from Andrew Sackville-West in http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20140731233051.GN17765@andrew-ThinkPad-X230 His scenario can be simplified down to a relatively simple isolationtester spec file which I don't include in this commit; the reason is that the current isolationtester is not able to deal with more than one blocked session concurrently and it blocks instead of raising the expected deadlock. In the future, if we improve isolationtester, it would be good to include the spec file in the isolation schedule. I posted it in http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20141212205254.GC1768@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Hat tip to Mark Kirkwood, who helped diagnose the trouble. -- Álvaro Herrera http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general