before reporting a transaction committed. Data consistency is still
guaranteed (unlike setting fsync = off), but a crash may lose the effects
of the last few transactions. Patch by Simon, some editorialization by Tom.
misleadingly-named WriteBuffer routine, and instead require routines that
change buffer pages to call MarkBufferDirty (which does exactly what it says).
We also require that they do so before calling XLogInsert; this takes care of
the synchronization requirement documented in SyncOneBuffer. Note that
because bufmgr takes the buffer content lock (in shared mode) while writing
out any buffer, it doesn't matter whether MarkBufferDirty is executed before
the buffer content change is complete, so long as the content change is
completed before releasing exclusive lock on the buffer. So it's OK to set
the dirtybit before we fill in the LSN.
This eliminates the former kluge of needing to set the dirtybit in LockBuffer.
Aside from making the code more transparent, we can also add some new
debugging assertions, in particular that the caller of MarkBufferDirty must
hold the buffer content lock, not merely a pin.
This commit doesn't make much functional change, but it does eliminate some
duplicated code --- for instance, PageIsNew tests are now done inside
XLogReadBuffer rather than by each caller.
The GIST xlog code still needs a lot of love, but I'll worry about that
separately.
communication structure, and make it its own module with its own lock.
This should reduce contention at least a little, and it definitely makes
the code seem cleaner. Per my recent proposal.
as per recent discussions. Invent SubTransactionIds that are managed like
CommandIds (ie, counter is reset at start of each top transaction), and
use these instead of TransactionIds to keep track of subtransaction status
in those modules that need it. This means that a subtransaction does not
need an XID unless it actually inserts/modifies rows in the database.
Accordingly, don't assign it an XID nor take a lock on the XID until it
tries to do that. This saves a lot of overhead for subtransactions that
are only used for error recovery (eg plpgsql exceptions). Also, arrange
to release a subtransaction's XID lock as soon as the subtransaction
exits, in both the commit and abort cases. This avoids holding many
unique locks after a long series of subtransactions. The price is some
additional overhead in XactLockTableWait, but that seems acceptable.
Finally, restructure the state machine in xact.c to have a more orthogonal
set of states for subtransactions.
Tom Lane