StrategyGetBuffer() has proven to be a bottleneck in a number of
buffer acquisition heavy workloads. To some degree this has already
been alleviated by 5d7962c6, but it still can be quite a heavy
bottleneck. The problem is that in unfortunate usage patterns a
single StrategyGetBuffer() call will have to look at a large number of
buffers - in turn making it likely that the process will be put to
sleep while still holding the spinlock.
Replace most of the usage of the buffer_strategy_lock spinlock for the
clock sweep by a atomic nextVictimBuffer variable. That variable,
modulo NBuffers, is the current hand of the clock sweep. The buffer
clock-sweep then only needs to acquire the spinlock after a
wraparound. And even then only in the process that did the wrapping
around. That alleviates nearly all the contention on the relevant
spinlock, although significant contention on the cacheline can still
exist.
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas and Amit Kapila
Discussion: 20141010160020.GG6670@alap3.anarazel.de,
20141027133218.GA2639@awork2.anarazel.de
The old LWLock implementation had the problem that concurrent lock
acquisitions required exclusively acquiring a spinlock. Often that
could lead to acquirers waiting behind the spinlock, even if the
actual LWLock was free.
The new implementation doesn't acquire the spinlock when acquiring the
lock itself. Instead the new atomic operations are used to atomically
manipulate the state. Only the waitqueue, used solely in the slow
path, is still protected by the spinlock. Check lwlock.c's header for
an explanation about the used algorithm.
For some common workloads on larger machines this can yield
significant performance improvements. Particularly in read mostly
workloads.
Reviewed-By: Amit Kapila and Robert Haas
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: 20130926225545.GB26663@awork2.anarazel.de
Besides being shorter and much easier to read it changes the logic in
LWLockRelease() to release all shared lockers when waking up any. This
can yield some significant performance improvements - and the fairness
isn't really much worse than before, as we always allowed new shared
lockers to jump the queue.
In LWLockRelease() (and in 9.4+ LWLockUpdateVar()) we release enqueued
waiters using PGSemaphoreUnlock(). As there are other sources of such
unlocks backends only wake up if MyProc->lwWaiting is set to false;
which is only done in the aforementioned functions.
Before this commit there were dangers because the store to lwWaitLink
could become visible before the store to lwWaitLink. This could both
happen due to compiler reordering (on most compilers) and on some
platforms due to the CPU reordering stores.
The possible consequence of this is that a backend stops waiting
before lwWaitLink is set to NULL. If that backend then tries to
acquire another lock and has to wait there the list could become
corrupted once the lwWaitLink store is finally performed.
Add a write memory barrier to prevent that issue.
Unfortunately the barrier support has been only added in 9.2. Given
that the issue has not knowingly been observed in praxis it seems
sufficient to prohibit compiler reordering using volatile for 9.0 and
9.1. Actual problems due to compiler reordering are more likely
anyway.
Discussion: 20140210134625.GA15246@awork2.anarazel.de
Previously, if you wanted anything besides C-string hash keys, you had to
specify a custom hashing function to hash_create(). Nearly all such
callers were specifying tag_hash or oid_hash; which is tedious, and rather
error-prone, since a caller could easily miss the opportunity to optimize
by using hash_uint32 when appropriate. Replace this with a design whereby
callers using simple binary-data keys just specify HASH_BLOBS and don't
need to mess with specific support functions. hash_create() itself will
take care of optimizing when the key size is four bytes.
This nets out saving a few hundred bytes of code space, and offers
a measurable performance improvement in tidbitmap.c (which was not
exploiting the opportunity to use hash_uint32 for its 4-byte keys).
There might be some wins elsewhere too, I didn't analyze closely.
In future we could look into offering a similar optimized hashing function
for 8-byte keys. Under this design that could be done in a centralized
and machine-independent fashion, whereas getting it right for keys of
platform-dependent sizes would've been notationally painful before.
For the moment, the old way still works fine, so as not to break source
code compatibility for loadable modules. Eventually we might want to
remove tag_hash and friends from the exported API altogether, since there's
no real need for them to be explicitly referenced from outside dynahash.c.
Teodor Sigaev and Tom Lane
Transactions can now set their commit timestamp directly as they commit,
or an external transaction commit timestamp can be fed from an outside
system using the new function TransactionTreeSetCommitTsData(). This
data is crash-safe, and truncated at Xid freeze point, same as pg_clog.
This module is disabled by default because it causes a performance hit,
but can be enabled in postgresql.conf requiring only a server restart.
A new test in src/test/modules is included.
Catalog version bumped due to the new subdirectory within PGDATA and a
couple of new SQL functions.
Authors: Álvaro Herrera and Petr Jelínek
Reviewed to varying degrees by Michael Paquier, Andres Freund, Robert
Haas, Amit Kapila, Fujii Masao, Jaime Casanova, Simon Riggs, Steven
Singer, Peter Eisentraut
Each WAL record now carries information about the modified relation and
block(s) in a standardized format. That makes it easier to write tools that
need that information, like pg_rewind, prefetching the blocks to speed up
recovery, etc.
There's a whole new API for building WAL records, replacing the XLogRecData
chains used previously. The new API consists of XLogRegister* functions,
which are called for each buffer and chunk of data that is added to the
record. The new API also gives more control over when a full-page image is
written, by passing flags to the XLogRegisterBuffer function.
This also simplifies the XLogReadBufferForRedo() calls. The function can dig
the relation and block number from the WAL record, so they no longer need to
be passed as arguments.
For the convenience of redo routines, XLogReader now disects each WAL record
after reading it, copying the main data part and the per-block data into
MAXALIGNed buffers. The data chunks are not aligned within the WAL record,
but the redo routines can assume that the pointers returned by XLogRecGet*
functions are. Redo routines are now passed the XLogReaderState, which
contains the record in the already-disected format, instead of the plain
XLogRecord.
The new record format also makes the fixed size XLogRecord header smaller,
by removing the xl_len field. The length of the "main data" portion is now
stored at the end of the WAL record, and there's a separate header after
XLogRecord for it. The alignment padding at the end of XLogRecord is also
removed. This compansates for the fact that the new format would otherwise
be more bulky than the old format.
Reviewed by Andres Freund, Amit Kapila, Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera,
Fujii Masao.
Unlogged relations are only reset when performing a unclean
restart. That means they have to be synced to disk during clean
shutdowns. During normal processing that's achieved by registering a
buffer's file to be fsynced at the next checkpoint when flushed. But
ResetUnloggedRelations() doesn't go through the buffer manager, so
nothing will force reset relations to disk before the next shutdown
checkpoint.
So just make ResetUnloggedRelations() fsync the newly created main
forks to disk.
Discussion: 20140912112246.GA4984@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch to 9.1 where unlogged tables were introduced.
Abhijit Menon-Sen and Andres Freund
There was a window in RestoreBackupBlock where a page would be zeroed out,
but not yet locked. If a backend pinned and locked the page in that window,
it saw the zeroed page instead of the old page or new page contents, which
could lead to missing rows in a result set, or errors.
To fix, replace RBM_ZERO with RBM_ZERO_AND_LOCK, which atomically pins,
zeroes, and locks the page, if it's not in the buffer cache already.
In stable branches, the old RBM_ZERO constant is renamed to RBM_DO_NOT_USE,
to avoid breaking any 3rd party extensions that might use RBM_ZERO. More
importantly, this avoids renumbering the other enum values, which would
cause even bigger confusion in extensions that use ReadBufferExtended, but
haven't been recompiled.
Backpatch to all supported versions; this has been racy since hot standby
was introduced.
BRIN is a new index access method intended to accelerate scans of very
large tables, without the maintenance overhead of btrees or other
traditional indexes. They work by maintaining "summary" data about
block ranges. Bitmap index scans work by reading each summary tuple and
comparing them with the query quals; all pages in the range are returned
in a lossy TID bitmap if the quals are consistent with the values in the
summary tuple, otherwise not. Normal index scans are not supported
because these indexes do not store TIDs.
As new tuples are added into the index, the summary information is
updated (if the block range in which the tuple is added is already
summarized) or not; in the latter case, a subsequent pass of VACUUM or
the brin_summarize_new_values() function will create the summary
information.
For data types with natural 1-D sort orders, the summary info consists
of the maximum and the minimum values of each indexed column within each
page range. This type of operator class we call "Minmax", and we
supply a bunch of them for most data types with B-tree opclasses.
Since the BRIN code is generalized, other approaches are possible for
things such as arrays, geometric types, ranges, etc; even for things
such as enum types we could do something different than minmax with
better results. In this commit I only include minmax.
Catalog version bumped due to new builtin catalog entries.
There's more that could be done here, but this is a good step forwards.
Loosely based on ideas from Simon Riggs; code mostly by Álvaro Herrera,
with contribution by Heikki Linnakangas.
Patch reviewed by: Amit Kapila, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas.
Testing help from Jeff Janes, Erik Rijkers, Emanuel Calvo.
PS:
The research leading to these results has received funding from the
European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under
grant agreement n° 318633.
xlog.c is huge, this makes it a little bit smaller, which is nice. Functions
related to putting together the WAL record are in xloginsert.c, and the
lower level stuff for managing WAL buffers and such are in xlog.c.
Also move the definition of XLogRecord to a separate header file. This
causes churn in the #includes of all the files that write WAL records, and
redo routines, but it avoids pulling in xlog.h into most places.
Reviewed by Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera, Andres Freund and Amit Kapila.
This reassociates a dynamic shared memory handle previous passed to
dsm_pin_mapping with the current resource owner, so that it will be
cleaned up at the end of the current query.
Patch by me. Review of the function name by Andres Freund, Amit
Kapila, Jim Nasby, Petr Jelinek, and Álvaro Herrera.
Nobody seemed concerned about this naming when it originally went in,
but there's a pending patch that implements the opposite of
dsm_keep_mapping, and the term "unkeep" was judged unpalatable.
"unpin" has existing precedent in the PostgreSQL code base, and the
English language, so use this terminology instead.
Per discussion, back-patch to 9.4.
CREATE DATABASE and ALTER DATABASE .. SET TABLESPACE copy the source
database directory on the filesystem level. To ensure the on disk
state is consistent they block out users of the affected database and
force a checkpoint to flush out all data to disk. Unfortunately, up to
now, that checkpoint didn't flush out dirty buffers from unlogged
relations.
That bug means there could be leftover dirty buffers in either the
template database, or the database in its old location. Leading to
problems when accessing relations in an inconsistent state; and to
possible problems during shutdown in the SET TABLESPACE case because
buffers belonging files that don't exist anymore are flushed.
This was reported in bug #10675 by Maxim Boguk.
Fix by Pavan Deolasee, modified somewhat by me. Reviewed by MauMau and
Fujii Masao.
Backpatch to 9.1 where unlogged tables were introduced.
LWLockRelease should release all backends waiting with LWLockWaitForVar,
even when another backend has already been woken up to acquire the lock,
i.e. when releaseOK is false. LWLockWaitForVar can return as soon as the
protected value changes, even if the other backend will acquire the lock.
Fix that by resetting releaseOK to true in LWLockWaitForVar, whenever
adding itself to the wait queue.
This should fix the bug reported by MauMau, where the system occasionally
hangs when there is a lot of concurrent WAL activity and a checkpoint.
Backpatch to 9.4, where this code was added.
shm_mq_sendv sends a message to the queue assembled from multiple
locations. This is expected to be used by forthcoming patches to
allow frontend/backend protocol messages to be sent via shm_mq, but
might be useful for other purposes as well.
shm_mq_set_handle associates a BackgroundWorkerHandle with an
already-existing shm_mq_handle. This solves a timing problem when
creating a shm_mq to communicate with a newly-launched background
worker: if you attach to the queue first, and the background worker
fails to start, you might block forever trying to do I/O on the queue;
but if you start the background worker first, but then die before
attaching to the queue, the background worrker might block forever
trying to do I/O on the queue. This lets you attach before starting
the worker (so that the worker is protected) and then associate the
BackgroundWorkerHandle later (so that you are also protected).
Patch by me, reviewed by Stephen Frost.
Testing by Amit Kapila, Andres Freund, and myself, with and without
other patches that also aim to improve scalability, seems to indicate
that this change is a significant win over the current value and over
smaller values such as 64. It's not clear how high we can push this
value before it starts to have negative side-effects elsewhere, but
going this far looks OK.
Several upcoming performance/scalability improvements require atomic
operations. This new API avoids the need to splatter compiler and
architecture dependent code over all the locations employing atomic
ops.
For several of the potential usages it'd be problematic to maintain
both, a atomics using implementation and one using spinlocks or
similar. In all likelihood one of the implementations would not get
tested regularly under concurrency. To avoid that scenario the new API
provides a automatic fallback of atomic operations to spinlocks. All
properties of atomic operations are maintained. This fallback -
obviously - isn't as fast as just using atomic ops, but it's not bad
either. For one of the future users the atomics ontop spinlocks
implementation was actually slightly faster than the old purely
spinlock using implementation. That's important because it reduces the
fear of regressing older platforms when improving the scalability for
new ones.
The API, loosely modeled after the C11 atomics support, currently
provides 'atomic flags' and 32 bit unsigned integers. If the platform
efficiently supports atomic 64 bit unsigned integers those are also
provided.
To implement atomics support for a platform/architecture/compiler for
a type of atomics 32bit compare and exchange needs to be
implemented. If available and more efficient native support for flags,
32 bit atomic addition, and corresponding 64 bit operations may also
be provided. Additional useful atomic operations are implemented
generically ontop of these.
The implementation for various versions of gcc, msvc and sun studio have
been tested. Additional existing stub implementations for
* Intel icc
* HUPX acc
* IBM xlc
are included but have never been tested. These will likely require
fixes based on buildfarm and user feedback.
As atomic operations also require barriers for some operations the
existing barrier support has been moved into the atomics code.
Author: Andres Freund with contributions from Oskari Saarenmaa
Reviewed-By: Amit Kapila, Robert Haas, Heikki Linnakangas and Álvaro Herrera
Discussion: CA+TgmoYBW+ux5-8Ja=Mcyuy8=VXAnVRHp3Kess6Pn3DMXAPAEA@mail.gmail.com,
20131015123303.GH5300@awork2.anarazel.de,
20131028205522.GI20248@awork2.anarazel.de
Previously, we used an lwlock that was held from the time we began
seeking a candidate buffer until the time when we found and pinned
one, which is disastrous for concurrency. Instead, use a spinlock
which is held just long enough to pop the freelist or advance the
clock sweep hand, and then released. If we need to advance the clock
sweep further, we reacquire the spinlock once per buffer.
This represents a significant increase in atomic operations around
buffer eviction, but it still wins on many workloads. On others, it
may result in no gain, or even cause a regression, unless the number
of buffer mapping locks is also increased. However, that seems like
material for a separate commit. We may also need to consider other
methods of mitigating contention on this spinlock, such as splitting
it into multiple locks or jumping the clock sweep hand more than one
buffer at a time, but those, too, seem like separate improvements.
Patch by me, inspired by a much larger patch from Amit Kapila.
Reviewed by Andres Freund.
Now that spinlocks (hopefully!) act as compiler barriers, as of commit
0709b7ee72, this should be safe. This
serves as a demonstration of the new coding style, and may be optimized
better on some machines as well.
Previously, they functioned as barriers against CPU reordering but not
compiler reordering, an odd API that required extensive use of volatile
everywhere that spinlocks are used. That's error-prone and has negative
implications for performance, so change it.
In theory, this makes it safe to remove many of the uses of volatile
that we currently have in our code base, but we may find that there are
some bugs in this effort when we do. In the long run, though, this
should make for much more maintainable code.
Patch by me. Review by Andres Freund.
68a2e52bba has introduced LWLockAcquireCommon() containing the
previous contents of LWLockAcquire() plus added functionality. The
latter then calls it, just like LWLockAcquireWithVar(). Because the
majority of callers don't need the added functionality, declare the
common code as inline. The compiler then can optimize away the unused
code. Doing so is also useful when looking at profiles, to
differentiate the users.
Backpatch to 9.4, the first branch to contain LWLockAcquireCommon().
Since the dawn of time (aka Postgres95) multiple pins of the same
buffer by one backend have been optimized not to modify the shared
refcount more than once. This optimization has always used a NBuffer
sized array in each backend keeping track of a backend's pins.
That array (PrivateRefCount) was one of the biggest per-backend memory
allocations, depending on the shared_buffers setting. Besides the
waste of memory it also has proven to be a performance bottleneck when
assertions are enabled as we make sure that there's no remaining pins
left at the end of transactions. Also, on servers with lots of memory
and a correspondingly high shared_buffers setting the amount of random
memory accesses can also lead to poor cpu cache efficiency.
Because of these reasons a backend's buffers pins are now kept track
of in a small statically sized array that overflows into a hash table
when necessary. Benchmarks have shown neutral to positive performance
results with considerably lower memory usage.
Patch by me, review by Robert Haas.
Discussion: 20140321182231.GA17111@alap3.anarazel.de
shm_mq_send_bytes didn't invariably initialize *bytes_written before
returning, which would cause shm_mq_send to read from uninitialized
memory and add the value it found there to mqh->mqh_partial_bytes.
This could cause the next attempt to send a message via the queue to
fail an assertion (if the queue was detached) or copy data from a
garbage pointer value into the queue (if non-blocking mode was in use).
get_raw_page tried to validate the supplied block number against
RelationGetNumberOfBlocks(), which of course is only right when
accessing the main fork. In most cases, the main fork is longer
than the others, so that the check was too weak (allowing a
lower-level error to be reported, but no real harm to be done).
However, very small tables could have an FSM larger than their heap,
in which case the mistake prevented access to some FSM pages.
Per report from Torsten Foertsch.
In passing, make the bad-block-number error into an ereport not elog
(since it's certainly not an internal error); and fix sloppily
maintained comment for RelationGetNumberOfBlocksInFork.
This has been wrong since we invented relation forks, so back-patch
to all supported branches.
The assertion failed if WAL_DEBUG or LWLOCK_STATS was enabled; fix that by
using separate memory contexts for the allocations made within those code
blocks.
This patch introduces a mechanism for marking any memory context as allowed
in a critical section. Previously ErrorContext was exempt as a special case.
Instead of a blanket exception of the checkpointer process, only exempt the
memory context used for the pending ops hash table.
The existance of the assert_enabled variable (backing the
debug_assertions GUC) reduced the amount of knowledge some static code
checkers (like coverity and various compilers) could infer from the
existance of the assertion. That could have been solved by optionally
removing the assertion_enabled variable from the Assert() et al macros
at compile time when some special macro is defined, but the resulting
complication doesn't seem to be worth the gain from having
debug_assertions. Recompiling is fast enough.
The debug_assertions GUC is still available, but readonly, as it's
useful when diagnosing problems. The commandline/client startup option
-A, which previously also allowed to enable/disable assertions, has
been removed as it doesn't serve a purpose anymore.
While at it, reduce code duplication in bufmgr.c and localbuf.c
assertions checking for spurious buffer pins. That code had to be
reindented anyway to cope with the assert_enabled removal.
It's critical that the backend's idea of LOBLKSIZE match the way data has
actually been divided up in pg_largeobject. While we don't provide any
direct way to adjust that value, doing so is a one-line source code change
and various people have expressed interest recently in changing it. So,
just as with TOAST_MAX_CHUNK_SIZE, it seems prudent to record the value in
pg_control and cross-check that the backend's compiled-in setting matches
the on-disk data.
Also tweak the code in inv_api.c so that fetches from pg_largeobject
explicitly verify that the length of the data field is not more than
LOBLKSIZE. Formerly we just had Asserts() for that, which is no protection
at all in production builds. In some of the call sites an overlength data
value would translate directly to a security-relevant stack clobber, so it
seems worth one extra runtime comparison to be sure.
In the back branches, we can't change the contents of pg_control; but we
can still make the extra checks in inv_api.c, which will offer some amount
of protection against running with the wrong value of LOBLKSIZE.
The previous coding would potentially cause attaching to segment A to
fail if segment B was at the same time in the process of going away.
Andres Freund, with a comment tweak by me
Commit fad153ec45 modified sinval.c to reduce
the number of calls into sinvaladt.c (which require taking a shared lock)
by keeping a local buffer of collected-but-not-yet-processed messages.
However, if processing of the last message in a batch resulted in a
recursive call to ReceiveSharedInvalidMessages, we could overwrite that
message with a new one while the outer invalidation function was still
working on it. This would be likely to lead to invalidation of the wrong
cache entry, allowing subsequent processing to use stale cache data.
The fix is just to make a local copy of each message while we're processing
it.
Spotted by Andres Freund. Back-patch to 8.4 where the bug was introduced.
This was intended to work always, but the previous code only allowed
it if at least one message was successfully read by the receiver
before the sender detached the queue.
Report by Petr Jelinek. Patch by me.
Commit a730183926 created rather a mess by
putting dependencies on backend-only include files into include/common.
We really shouldn't do that. To clean it up:
* Move TABLESPACE_VERSION_DIRECTORY back to its longtime home in
catalog/catalog.h. We won't consider this symbol part of the FE/BE API.
* Push enum ForkNumber from relfilenode.h into relpath.h. We'll consider
relpath.h as the source of truth for fork numbers, since relpath.c was
already partially serving that function, and anyway relfilenode.h was
kind of a random place for that enum.
* So, relfilenode.h now includes relpath.h rather than vice-versa. This
direction of dependency is fine. (That allows most, but not quite all,
of the existing explicit #includes of relpath.h to go away again.)
* Push forkname_to_number from catalog.c to relpath.c, just to centralize
fork number stuff a bit better.
* Push GetDatabasePath from catalog.c to relpath.c; it was rather odd
that the previous commit didn't keep this together with relpath().
* To avoid needing relfilenode.h in common/, redefine the underlying
function (now called GetRelationPath) as taking separate OID arguments,
and make the APIs using RelFileNode or RelFileNodeBackend into macro
wrappers. (The macros have a potential multiple-eval risk, but none of
the existing call sites have an issue with that; one of them had such a
risk already anyway.)
* Fix failure to follow the directions when "init" fork type was added;
specifically, the errhint in forkname_to_number wasn't updated, and neither
was the SGML documentation for pg_relation_size().
* Fix tablespace-path-too-long check in CreateTableSpace() to account for
fork-name component of maximum-length pathnames. This requires putting
FORKNAMECHARS into a header file, but it was rather useless (and
actually unreferenced) where it was.
The last couple of items are potentially back-patchable bug fixes,
if anyone is sufficiently excited about them; but personally I'm not.
Per a gripe from Christoph Berg about how include/common wasn't
self-contained.
Original coding failed to enlarge the array as required if
the requested tranche_id was equal to LWLockTranchesAllocated.
In passing, fix poor style of not casting the result of (re)palloc.
Apparently, Windows can sometimes return an error code even when the
operation actually worked just fine. Rearrange the order of checks
according to what appear to be the best practices in this area.
Amit Kapila
Instead of storing the ID of the dynamic shared memory control
segment in a file within the data directory, store it in the main
control segment. This avoids a number of nasty corner cases,
most seriously that doing an online backup and then using it on
the same machine (e.g. to fire up a standby) would result in the
standby clobbering all of the master's dynamic shared memory
segments.
Per complaints from Heikki Linnakangas, Fujii Masao, and Tom
Lane.
The one existing assertion of this type has tripped a few times in the
buildfarm lately, but it's not clear whether the problem is really
originating there or whether it's leftovers from a trip through one
of the other two paths that lack a matching assertion. So add one.
Since the same bug(s) most likely exist(s) in the back-branches also,
back-patch to 9.2, where the fast-path lock mechanism was added.