Writing a trailing semicolon in a macro is almost never the right thing,
because you almost always want to write a semicolon after each macro
call instead. (Even if there was some reason to prefer not to, pgindent
would probably make a hash of code formatted that way; so within PG the
rule should basically be "don't do it".) Thus, if we have a semi inside
the macro, the compiler sees "something;;". Much of the time the extra
empty statement is harmless, but it could lead to mysterious syntax
errors at call sites. In perhaps an overabundance of neatnik-ism, let's
run around and get rid of the excess semicolons whereever possible.
The only thing worse than a mysterious syntax error is a mysterious
syntax error that only happens in the back branches; therefore,
backpatch these changes where relevant, which is most of them because
most of these mistakes are old. (The lack of reported problems shows
that this is largely a hypothetical issue, but still, it could bite
us in some future patch.)
John Naylor and Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CACPNZCs0qWTqJ2QUSGJ07B7uvAvzMb-KbG2q+oo+J3tsWN5cqw@mail.gmail.com
It's standard for quicksort implementations, after having partitioned the
input into two subgroups, to recurse to process the smaller partition and
then handle the larger partition by iterating. This method guarantees
that no more than log2(N) levels of recursion can be needed. However,
Bentley and McIlroy argued that checking to see which partition is smaller
isn't worth the cycles, and so their code doesn't do that but just always
recurses on the left partition. In most cases that's fine; but with
worst-case input we might need O(N) levels of recursion, and that means
that qsort could be driven to stack overflow. Such an overflow seems to
be the only explanation for today's report from Yiqing Jin of a SIGSEGV
in med3_tuple while creating an index of a couple billion entries with a
very large maintenance_work_mem setting. Therefore, let's spend the few
additional cycles and lines of code needed to choose the smaller partition
for recursion.
Also, fix up the qsort code so that it properly uses size_t not int for
some intermediate values representing numbers of items. This would only
be a live risk when sorting more than INT_MAX bytes (in qsort/qsort_arg)
or tuples (in qsort_tuple), which I believe would never happen with any
caller in the current core code --- but perhaps it could happen with
call sites in third-party modules? In any case, this is trouble waiting
to happen, and the corrected code is probably if anything shorter and
faster than before, since it removes sign-extension steps that had to
happen when converting between int and size_t.
In passing, move a couple of CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() calls so that it's
not necessary to preserve the value of "r" across them, and prettify
the output of gen_qsort_tuple.pl a little.
Back-patch to all supported branches. The odds of hitting this issue
are probably higher in 9.4 and up than before, due to the new ability
to allocate sort workspaces exceeding 1GB, but there's no good reason
to believe that it's impossible to crash older branches this way.
Per recent work by Peter Geoghegan, it's significantly faster to
tuplesort on a single sortkey if ApplySortComparator is inlined into
quicksort rather reached via a function pointer. It's also faster
in general to have a version of quicksort which is specialized for
sorting SortTuple objects rather than objects of arbitrary size and
type. This requires a couple of additional copies of the quicksort
logic, which in this patch are generate using a Perl script. There
might be some benefit in adding further specializations here too,
but thus far it's not clear that those gains are worth their weight
in code footprint.
repeatedly. Now that we don't have to worry about memory leaks from
glibc's qsort, we can safely put CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS into the tuplesort
comparators, as was requested a couple months ago. Also, get rid of
non-reentrancy and an extra level of function call in tuplesort.c by
providing a variant qsort_arg() API that passes an extra void * argument
through to the comparison routine. (We might want to use that in other
places too, I didn't look yet.)
Thomas Munro
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Robert Haas
Magnus Hagander
Neil Conway