During allocation VALGRIND_MAKE_MEM_DEFINED was called with a pointer
as size. That kind of works, but makes valgrind exceedingly slow for
workloads involving the slab allocator.
Secondly there was an access to memory marked as unreachable within
SlabCheck(). Fix that too.
Author: Tomas Vondra
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/a6543b6d-6015-99b1-63ef-3ed55a76a730@2ndquadrant.com
Compilers that don't realize that elog(ERROR) doesn't return
complained that SlabRealloc() failed to return a value.
While at it, fix the rather muddled header comment for the function.
Per buildfarm.
The new slab allocator needs different per-allocation information than
the classical aset.c. The definition in 58b25e981 wasn't sufficiently
careful on 32 platforms with 8 byte alignment, leading to buildfarm
failures. That's not entirely easy to fix by just adjusting the
definition.
As slab.c doesn't actually need the size part(s) of the common header,
all chunks are equally sized after all, it seems better to instead
reduce the header to the part needed by all allocators, namely which
context an allocation belongs to. That has the advantage of reducing
the overhead of slab allocations, and also allows for more flexibility
in future allocators.
To avoid spreading the logic about accessing a chunk's context around,
centralize it in GetMemoryChunkContext(), which allows to delete a
good number of lines.
A followup commit will revise the mmgr/README portion about
StandardChunkHeader, and more.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170228074420.aazv4iw6k562mnxg@alap3.anarazel.de
The default general purpose aset.c style memory context is not a great
choice for allocations that are all going to be evenly sized,
especially when those objects aren't small, and have varying
lifetimes. There tends to be a lot of fragmentation, larger
allocations always directly go to libc rather than have their cost
amortized over several pallocs.
These problems lead to the introduction of ad-hoc slab allocators in
reorderbuffer.c. But it turns out that the simplistic implementation
leads to problems when a lot of objects are allocated and freed, as
aset.c is still the underlying implementation. Especially freeing can
easily run into O(n^2) behavior in aset.c.
While the O(n^2) behavior in aset.c can, and probably will, be
addressed, custom allocators for this behavior are more efficient
both in space and time.
This allocator is for evenly sized allocations, and supports both
cheap allocations and freeing, without fragmenting significantly. It
does so by allocating evenly sized blocks via malloc(), and carves
them into chunks that can be used for allocations. In order to
release blocks to the OS as early as possible, chunks are allocated
from the fullest block that still has free objects, increasing the
likelihood of a block being entirely unused.
A subsequent commit uses this in reorderbuffer.c, but a further
allocator is needed to resolve the performance problems triggering
this work.
There likely are further potentialy uses of this allocator besides
reorderbuffer.c.
There's potential further optimizations of the new slab.c, in
particular the array of freelists could be replaced by a more
intelligent structure - but for now this looks more than good enough.
Author: Tomas Vondra, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund, Petr Jelinek, Robert Haas, Jim Nasby
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/d15dff83-0b37-28ed-0809-95a5cc7292ad@2ndquadrant.com
