portability issues). Caller-visible data structures are now allocated
on MAXALIGN boundaries, allowing safe use of datatypes wider than 'long'.
Rejigger hash_create API so that caller specifies size of key and
total size of entry, not size of key and size of rest of entry.
This simplifies life considerably since each number is just a sizeof(),
and padding issues etc. are taken care of automatically.
existing lock manager and spinlocks: it understands exclusive vs shared
lock but has few other fancy features. Replace most uses of spinlocks
with lightweight locks. All remaining uses of spinlocks have very short
lock hold times (a few dozen instructions), so tweak spinlock backoff
code to work efficiently given this assumption. All per my proposal on
pghackers 26-Sep-01.
included by everything that includes bufmgr.h --- it's supposed to be
internals, after all, not part of the API! This fixes the conflict
against FreeBSD headers reported by Rosenman, by making it unnecessary
for s_lock.h to be included by plperl.c.
IPC key assignment will now work correctly even when multiple postmasters
are using same logical port number (which is possible given -k switch).
There is only one shared-mem segment per postmaster now, not 3.
Rip out broken code for non-TAS case in bufmgr and xlog, substitute a
complete S_LOCK emulation using semaphores in spin.c. TAS and non-TAS
logic is now exactly the same.
When deadlock is detected, "Deadlock detected" is now the elog(ERROR)
message, rather than a NOTICE that comes out before an unhelpful ERROR.
(WAL logging for this is not done yet, however.) Clean up a number of really
crufty things that are no longer needed now that DROP behaves nicely. Make
temp table mapper do the right things when drop or rename affecting a temp
table is rolled back. Also, remove "relation modified while in use" error
check, in favor of locking tables at first reference and holding that lock
throughout the statement.
from bufmgr - it would be nice to have separate hash in smgr
for node <--> fd mappings, but for the moment it's easy to
add new hash to relcache.
Fixed small bug in xlog.c:ReadRecord.
as a shared dirtybit for each shared buffer. The shared dirtybit still
controls writing the buffer, but the local bit controls whether we need
to fsync the buffer's file. This arrangement fixes a bug that allowed
some required fsyncs to be missed, and should improve performance as well.
For more info see my post of same date on pghackers.
* 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.