Every time the best-tuple-found-so-far changes, we need to reset all
the penalty values in which_grow[] to the penalties for the new best
tuple. The old code failed to do this, resulting in inferior index
quality.
The original patch from Alexander Korotkov was just two lines; I took
the liberty of fleshing that out by adding a bunch of comments that I
hope will make this logic easier for others to understand than it was
for me.
We used to mimic the way a stack is constructed when descending the tree
during normal GiST inserts, but that was quite complicated during a buffered
build. It was also wrong: in GiST, the left-to-right relationships on
different levels might not match each other, so that when you know the
parent of a child page, you won't necessarily find the parent of the page to
the right of the child page by following the rightlinks at the parent level.
This sometimes led to "could not re-find parent" errors while building a
GiST index.
We now use a simple hash table to track the parent of every internal page.
Whenever a page is split, and downlinks are moved from one page to another,
we update the hash table accordingly. This is also better for performance
than the old method, as we never need to move right to re-find the parent
page, which could take a significant amount of time for buffers that were
created much earlier in the index build.
There were two bugs here: We forgot to call gistFreeBuildBuffers() function
at the end of build, and we passed interXact == true to BufFileCreateTemp,
so the file wasn't automatically cleaned up at end-of-transaction either.
When we create a temporary copy of the old node buffer, in stack, we mustn't
leak that into any of the long-lived data structures. Before this patch,
when we called gistPopItupFromNodeBuffer(), it got added to the array of
"loaded buffers". After gistRelocateBuildBuffersOnSplit() exits, the
pointer added to the loaded buffers array points to garbage. Often that goes
unnotied, because when we go through the array of loaded buffers to unload
them, buffers with a NULL pageBuffer are ignored, which can often happen by
accident even if the pointer points to garbage.
This patch fixes that by marking the temporary copy in stack explicitly as
temporary, and refrain from adding buffers marked as temporary to the array
of loaded buffers.
While we're at it, initialize nodeBuffer->pageBlocknum to InvalidBlockNumber
and improve comments a bit. This isn't strictly necessary, but makes
debugging easier.
Previously it was thought that it's impossible as the code stands, because
insertions create buffers as tuples are cascaded downwards, and index
split also creaters buffers eagerly for all halves. But the example from
Jay Levitt demonstrates that it can happen, when the root page is split.
It's in fact OK if the buffer doesn't exist, so we just need to remove the
sanity check. In fact, we've been discussing the possibility of destroying
empty buffers to conserve memory, which would render the sanity check
completely useless anyway.
Fix by Alexander Korotkov
When building a GiST index that doesn't fit in cache, buffers are attached
to some internal nodes in the index. This speeds up the build by avoiding
random I/O that would otherwise be needed to traverse all the way down the
tree to the find right leaf page for tuple.
Alexander Korotkov
Robert Haas
Bruce Momjian
Heikki Linnakangas