New infrastructure is added which creates a set number of workers
(threads on Windows, forked processes on Unix). Jobs are then
handed out to these workers by the master process as needed.
pg_restore is adjusted to use this new infrastructure in place of the
old setup which created a new worker for each step on the fly. Parallel
dumps acquire a snapshot clone in order to stay consistent, if
available.
The parallel option is selected by the -j / --jobs command line
parameter of pg_dump.
Joachim Wieland, lightly editorialized by Andrew Dunstan.
libpgcommon is a new static library to allow sharing code among the
various frontend programs and backend; this lets us eliminate duplicate
implementations of common routines. We avoid libpgport, because that's
intended as a place for porting issues; per discussion, it seems better
to keep them separate.
The first use case, and the only implemented by this patch, is pg_malloc
and friends, which many frontend programs were already using.
At the same time, we can use this to provide palloc emulation functions
for the frontend; this way, some palloc-using files in the backend can
also be used by the frontend cleanly. To do this, we change palloc() in
the backend to be a function instead of a macro on top of
MemoryContextAlloc(). This was previously believed to cause loss of
performance, but this implementation has been tweaked by Tom and Andres
so that on modern compilers it provides a slight improvement over the
previous one.
This lets us clean up some places that were already with
localized hacks.
Most of the pg_malloc/palloc changes in this patch were authored by
Andres Freund. Zoltán Böszörményi also independently provided a form of
that. libpgcommon infrastructure was authored by Álvaro.
We had a number of variants on the theme of "malloc or die", with the
majority named like "pg_malloc", but by no means all. Standardize on the
names pg_malloc, pg_malloc0, pg_realloc, pg_strdup. Get rid of pg_calloc
entirely in favor of using pg_malloc0.
This is an essentially cosmetic change, so no back-patch. (I did find
a couple of places where psql and pg_dump were using plain malloc or
strdup instead of the pg_ versions, but they don't look significant
enough to bother back-patching.)
The old code was using exit_horribly or die_horribly other depending on
whether it had an ArchiveHandle on which to close the connection or not;
but there were places that were passing a NULL ArchiveHandle to
die_horribly, and other places that used exit_horribly while having an
AH available. So there wasn't all that much consistency.
Improve the situation by keeping only one of the routines, and instead
of having to pass the AH down from the caller, arrange for it to be
present for an on_exit_nicely callback to operate on.
Author: Joachim Wieland
Some tweaks by me
Per a suggestion from Robert Haas, in the ongoing "parallel pg_dump"
saga.
