for details). It doesn't really do that much yet, since there are no
short-term memory contexts in the executor, but the infrastructure is
in place and long-term contexts are handled reasonably. A few long-
standing bugs have been fixed, such as 'VACUUM; anything' in a single
query string crashing. Also, out-of-memory is now considered a
recoverable ERROR, not FATAL.
Eliminate a large amount of crufty, now-dead code in and around
memory management.
Fix problem with holding off SIGTRAP, SIGSEGV, etc in postmaster and
backend startup.
running gcc and HP's cc with warnings cranked way up. Signed vs unsigned
comparisons, routines declared static and then defined not-static,
that kind of thing. Tedious, but perhaps useful...
syscache and relcache flushes). Relcache entry rebuild now preserves
original tupledesc, rewrite rules, and triggers if possible, so that pointers
to these things remain valid --- if these things change while relcache entry
has positive refcount, we elog(ERROR) to avoid later crash. Arrange for
xact-local rels to be rebuilt when an SI inval message is seen for them,
so that they are updated by CommandCounterIncrement the same as regular rels.
(This is useful because of Hiroshi's recent changes to process our own SI
messages at CommandCounterIncrement time.) This allows simplification of
some routines that previously hacked around the lack of an automatic update.
catcache now keeps its own copy of tupledesc for its relation, rather than
depending on the relcache's copy; this avoids needing to reinitialize catcache
during a cache flush, which saves some cycles and eliminates nasty circularity
problems that occur if a cache flush happens while trying to initialize a
catcache.
Eliminate a number of permanent memory leaks that used to happen during
catcache or relcache flush; not least of which was that catcache never
freed any cached tuples! (Rule parsetree storage is still leaked, however;
will fix that separately.)
Nothing done yet about code that uses tuples retrieved by SearchSysCache
for longer than is safe.
transaction abort --- before it only worked if there was exactly one level
of allocation context stacked in the blank portal. Now it does the right
thing for any depth, including zero...
this one could be useful for people experiencing out-of-memory crashes while
executing queries which retrieve or use a very large number of tuples.
The problem happens when storage is allocated for functions results used in
a large query, for example:
select upper(name) from big_table;
select big_table.array[1] from big_table;
select count(upper(name)) from big_table;
This patch is a dirty hack that fixes the out-of-memory problem for the most
common cases, like the above ones. It is not the final solution for the
problem but it can work for some people, so I'm posting it.
The patch should be safe because all changes are under #ifdef. Furthermore
the feature can be enabled or disabled at runtime by the `free_tuple_memory'
options in the pg_options file. The option is disabled by default and must
be explicitly enabled at runtime to have any effect.
To enable the patch add the follwing line to Makefile.custom:
CUSTOM_COPT += -DFREE_TUPLE_MEMORY
To enable the option at runtime add the following line to pg_option:
free_tuple_memory=1
Massimo
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Jan Wieck
Marc G. Fournier