I found that half a dozen (nearly 5%) of our AllocSetContextCreate calls
had typos in the context-sizing parameters. While none of these led to
especially significant problems, they did create minor inefficiencies,
and it's now clear that expecting people to copy-and-paste those calls
accurately is not a great idea. Let's reduce the risk of future errors
by introducing single macros that encapsulate the common use-cases.
Three such macros are enough to cover all but two special-purpose contexts;
those two calls can be left as-is, I think.
While this patch doesn't in itself improve matters for third-party
extensions, it doesn't break anything for them either, and they can
gradually adopt the simplified notation over time.
In passing, change TopMemoryContext to use the default allocation
parameters. Formerly it could only be extended 8K at a time. That was
probably reasonable when this code was written; but nowadays we create
many more contexts than we did then, so that it's not unusual to have a
couple hundred K in TopMemoryContext, even without considering various
dubious code that sticks other things there. There seems no good reason
not to let it use growing blocks like most other contexts.
Back-patch to 9.6, mostly because that's still close enough to HEAD that
it's easy to do so, and keeping the branches in sync can be expected to
avoid some future back-patching pain. The bugs fixed by these changes
don't seem to be significant enough to justify fixing them further back.
Discussion: <21072.1472321324@sss.pgh.pa.us>
We had a report from Stefan Kaltenbrunner of a case in which postmaster
log files overran available disk space because multiple backends spewed
enormous context stats dumps upon hitting an out-of-memory condition.
Given the lack of similar reports, this isn't a common problem, but it
still seems worth doing something about. However, we don't want to just
blindly truncate the output, because that might prevent diagnosis of OOM
problems. What seems like a workable compromise is to limit the dump to
100 child contexts per parent, and summarize the space used within any
additional child contexts. That should help because practical cases where
the dump gets long will typically be huge numbers of siblings under the
same parent context; while the additional debugging value from seeing
details about individual siblings beyond 100 will not be large, we hope.
Anyway it doesn't take much code or memory space to do this, so let's try
it like this and see how things go.
Since the summarization mechanism requires passing totals back up anyway,
I took the opportunity to add a "grand total" line to the end of the
printout.
The tuplesort/tuplestore memory management logic assumed that the chunk
allocation overhead for its memtuples array could not increase when
increasing the array size. This is and always was true for tuplesort,
but we (I, I think) blindly copied that logic into tuplestore.c without
noticing that the assumption failed to hold for the much smaller array
elements used by tuplestore. Given rather small work_mem, this could
result in an improper complaint about "unexpected out-of-memory situation",
as reported by Brent DeSpain in bug #13530.
The easiest way to fix this is just to increase tuplestore's initial
array size so that the assumption holds. Rather than relying on magic
constants, though, let's export a #define from aset.c that represents
the safe allocation threshold, and make tuplestore's calculation depend
on that.
Do the same in tuplesort.c to keep the logic looking parallel, even though
tuplesort.c isn't actually at risk at present. This will keep us from
breaking it if we ever muck with the allocation parameters in aset.c.
Back-patch to all supported versions. The error message doesn't occur
pre-9.3, not so much because the problem can't happen as because the
pre-9.3 tuplestore code neglected to check for it. (The chance of
trouble is a great deal larger as of 9.3, though, due to changes in the
array-size-increasing strategy.) However, allowing LACKMEM() to become
true unexpectedly could still result in less-than-desirable behavior,
so let's patch it all the way back.
Initial experience with this feature suggests that instances of
MemoryContextCallback are likely to propagate into some widely-used headers
over time. As things stood, that would result in pulling memutils.h or
at least memnodes.h into common headers, which does not seem desirable.
Instead, let's decide that this feature is part of the "ordinary palloc
user" API rather than the "specialized context management" API, and as
such should be declared in palloc.h not memutils.h.
That is, MemoryContextReset() now means what was formerly meant by
MemoryContextResetAndDeleteChildren(), and the latter is now just a macro
alias for the former. If you really want the functionality that was
formerly provided by MemoryContextReset(), what you have to do is
MemoryContextResetChildren() plus MemoryContextResetOnly() (which is a
new API to reset *only* the named context and not touch its children).
The reason for this change is that near fifteen years of experience has
proven that there is noplace where old-style MemoryContextReset() is
actually what you want. Making that the default behavior has led to lots
of context-leakage bugs, while we've not found anyplace where it's actually
necessary to keep the child contexts; at least the standard regression
tests do not reveal anyplace where this change breaks anything. And there
are upcoming patches that will introduce additional reasons why child
contexts need to be removed.
We could change existing calls of MemoryContextResetAndDeleteChildren to be
just MemoryContextReset, but for the moment I'll leave them alone; they're
not costing anything.
This allows cleanup actions to be registered to be called just before a
particular memory context's contents are flushed (either by deletion or
MemoryContextReset). The patch in itself has no use-cases for this, but
several likely reasons for wanting this exist.
In passing, per discussion, rearrange some boolean fields in struct
MemoryContextData so as to avoid wasted padding space. For safety,
this requires making allowInCritSection's existence unconditional;
but I think that's a better approach than what was there anyway.
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 MaxAllocSize guard is convenient for most callers, because it
reduces the need for careful attention to overflow, data type selection,
and the SET_VARSIZE() limit. A handful of callers are happy to navigate
those hazards in exchange for the ability to allocate a larger chunk.
Introduce MemoryContextAllocHuge() and repalloc_huge(). Use this in
tuplesort.c and tuplestore.c, enabling internal sorts of up to INT_MAX
tuples, a factor-of-48 increase. In particular, B-tree index builds can
now benefit from much-larger maintenance_work_mem settings.
Reviewed by Stephen Frost, Simon Riggs and Jeff Janes.
Rewrite plancache.c so that a "cached plan" (which is rather a misnomer
at this point) can support generation of custom, parameter-value-dependent
plans, and can make an intelligent choice between using custom plans and
the traditional generic-plan approach. The specific choice algorithm
implemented here can probably be improved in future, but this commit is
all about getting the mechanism in place, not the policy.
In addition, restructure the API to greatly reduce the amount of extraneous
data copying needed. The main compromise needed to make that possible was
to split the initial creation of a CachedPlanSource into two steps. It's
worth noting in particular that SPI_saveplan is now deprecated in favor of
SPI_keepplan, which accomplishes the same end result with zero data
copying, and no need to then spend even more cycles throwing away the
original SPIPlan. The risk of long-term memory leaks while manipulating
SPIPlans has also been greatly reduced. Most of this improvement is based
on use of the recently-added MemoryContextSetParent primitive.
This function will be useful for altering the lifespan of a context after
creation (for example, by creating it under a transient context and later
reparenting it to belong to a long-lived context). It costs almost no new
code, since we can refactor what was there. Per my proposal of yesterday.
module and teach PREPARE and protocol-level prepared statements to use it.
In service of this, rearrange utility-statement processing so that parse
analysis does not assume table schemas can't change before execution for
utility statements (necessary because we don't attempt to re-acquire locks
for utility statements when reusing a stored plan). This requires some
refactoring of the ProcessUtility API, but it ends up cleaner anyway,
for instance we can get rid of the QueryContext global.
Still to do: fix up SPI and related code to use the plan cache; I'm tempted to
try to make SQL functions use it too. Also, there are at least some aspects
of system state that we want to ensure remain the same during a replan as in
the original processing; search_path certainly ought to behave that way for
instance, and perhaps there are others.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
performance front, but with feature freeze upon us I think it's time to
drive a stake in the ground and say that this will be in 7.5.
Alvaro Herrera, with some help from Tom Lane.
Both plannable queries and utility commands are now always executed
within Portals, which have been revamped so that they can handle the
load (they used to be good only for single SELECT queries). Restructure
code to push command-completion-tag selection logic out of postgres.c,
so that it won't have to be duplicated between simple and extended queries.
initdb forced due to addition of a field to Query nodes.
practice of evaluating MemSet's arguments multiple times, except for
the special case of newNode(), where we can assume the argument is
a constant sizeof() operator.
Also, add GetMemoryChunkContext() to mcxt.c's API, in preparation for
fixing recent GEQO breakage.
given any malloc block until something is first allocated in it; but
thereafter, MemoryContextReset won't release that first malloc block.
This preserves the quick-reset property of the original policy, without
forcing 8K to be allocated to every context whether any of it is ever
used or not. Also, remove some more no-longer-needed explicit freeing
during ExecEndPlan.
to make a reasonable attempt at accounting for palloc overhead, not just
the requested size of each memory chunk. Since in many scenarios this
will make for a significant reduction in the amount of space acquired,
partially compensate by doubling the default value of SORT_MEM to 1Mb.
Per discussion in pgsql-general around 9-Jun-2002..
elog(ERROR) not an Assert trap, since we've downgraded out-of-memory to
elog(ERROR) not a fatal error. Also, change the hard boundary from 256Mb
to 1Gb, just so that anyone who's actually got that much memory to spare
can play with TOAST objects approaching a gigabyte.
in-chunk leaks, overwrite-next-chunk leaks and overwrite block-freeptr leaks.
A in-chunk leak --- if something overwrite space after wanted (via palloc()
size, but it is still inside chunk. For example
x = palloc(12); /* create 16b chunk */
memset(x, '#', 13);
this leak is in the current source total invisible, because chunk is 16b and
leak is in the "align space".
For this feature I add data_size to StandardChunk, and all memory which go
from AllocSetAlloc() is marked as 0x7F.
The MemoryContextCheck() is compiled '#ifdef USE_ASSERT_CHECKING'.
I add this checking to 'tcop/postgres.c' and is active after each backend
query, but it is probably not sufficient, because some MemoryContext exist
only during memory processing --- will good if someone who known where
it is needful (Tom:-) add it for others contexts;
A problem in the current source is that we have still some malloc()
allocation that is not needful and this allocation is total invisible for
all context routines. For example Dllist in backend (pretty dirty it is in
catcache where values in Dllist are palloc-ed, but list is malloc-ed).
--- and BTW. this Dllist design stand in the way for query cache :-)
Tom, if you agree I start replace some mallocs.
BTW. --- Tom, have you idea for across transaction presistent allocation for
SQL functions? (like regex - now it is via malloc)
I almost forget. I add one if() to AllocSetAlloc(), for 'size' that are
greater than ALLOC_BIGCHUNK_LIMIT is not needful check AllocSetFreeIndex(),
because 'fidx' is always 'ALLOCSET_NUM_FREELISTS - 1'. It a little brisk up
allocation for very large chunks. Right?
Karel