* Buffer refcount cleanup (per my "progress report" to pghackers, 9/22).
* Add links to backend PROC structs to sinval's array of per-backend info,
and use these links for routines that need to check the state of all
backends (rather than the slow, complicated search of the ShmemIndex
hashtable that was used before). Add databaseOID to PROC structs.
* Use this to implement an interlock that prevents DESTROY DATABASE of
a database containing running backends. (It's a little tricky to prevent
a concurrently-starting backend from getting in there, since the new
backend is not able to lock anything at the time it tries to look up
its database in pg_database. My solution is to recheck that the DB is
OK at the end of InitPostgres. It may not be a 100% solution, but it's
a lot better than no interlock at all...)
* In ALTER TABLE RENAME, flush buffers for the relation before doing the
rename of the physical files, to ensure we don't get failures later from
mdblindwrt().
* Update TRUNCATE patch so that it actually compiles against current
sources :-(.
You should do "make clean all" after pulling these changes.
additional argument specifying the kind of lock to acquire/release (or
'NoLock' to do no lock processing). Ensure that all relations are locked
with some appropriate lock level before being examined --- this ensures
that relevant shared-inval messages have been processed and should prevent
problems caused by concurrent VACUUM. Fix several bugs having to do with
mismatched increment/decrement of relation ref count and mismatched
heap_open/close (which amounts to the same thing). A bogus ref count on
a relation doesn't matter much *unless* a SI Inval message happens to
arrive at the wrong time, which is probably why we got away with this
sloppiness for so long. Repair missing grab of AccessExclusiveLock in
DROP TABLE, ALTER/RENAME TABLE, etc, as noted by Hiroshi.
Recommend 'make clean all' after pulling this update; I modified the
Relation struct layout slightly.
Will post further discussion to pghackers list shortly.
Reply-To: hackers@hub.org, Dan McGuirk <mcguirk@indirect.com>
To: hackers@hub.org
Subject: [HACKERS] tmin writeback optimization
I was doing some profiling of the backend, and noticed that during a certain
benchmark I was running somewhere between 30% and 75% of the backend's CPU
time was being spent in calls to TransactionIdDidCommit() from
HeapTupleSatisfiesNow() or HeapTupleSatisfiesItself() to determine that
changed rows' transactions had in fact been committed even though the rows'
tmin values had not yet been set.
When a query looks at a given row, it needs to figure out whether the
transaction that changed the row has been committed and hence it should pay
attention to the row, or whether on the other hand the transaction is still
in progress or has been aborted and hence the row should be ignored. If
a tmin value is set, it is known definitively that the row's transaction
has been committed. However, if tmin is not set, the transaction
referred to in xmin must be looked up in pg_log, and this is what the
backend was spending a lot of time doing during my benchmark.
So, implementing a method suggested by Vadim, I created the following
patch that, the first time a query finds a committed row whose tmin value
is not set, sets it, and marks the buffer where the row is stored as
dirty. (It works for tmax, too.) This doesn't result in the boost in
real time performance I was hoping for, however it does decrease backend
CPU usage by up to two-thirds in certain situations, so it could be
rather beneficial in high-concurrency settings.
