Originally, we treated memory context names as potentially variable in
all cases, and therefore always copied them into the context header.
Commit 9fa6f00b1 rethought this a little bit and invented a distinction
between fixed and variable names, skipping the copy step for the former.
But we can make things both simpler and more useful by instead allowing
there to be two parts to a context's identification, a fixed "name" and
an optional, variable "ident". The name supplied in the context create
call is now required to be a compile-time-constant string in all cases,
as it is never copied but just pointed to. The "ident" string, if
wanted, is supplied later. This is needed because typically we want
the ident to be stored inside the context so that it's cleaned up
automatically on context deletion; that means it has to be copied into
the context before we can set the pointer.
The cost of this approach is basically just an additional pointer field
in struct MemoryContextData, which isn't much overhead, and is bought
back entirely in the AllocSet case by not needing a headerSize field
anymore, since we no longer have to cope with variable header length.
In addition, we can simplify the internal interfaces for memory context
creation still further, saving a few cycles there. And it's no longer
true that a custom identifier disqualifies a context from participating
in aset.c's freelist scheme, so possibly there's some win on that end.
All the places that were using non-compile-time-constant context names
are adjusted to put the variable info into the "ident" instead. This
allows more effective identification of those contexts in many cases;
for example, subsidary contexts of relcache entries are now identified
by both type (e.g. "index info") and relname, where before you got only
one or the other. Contexts associated with PL function cache entries
are now identified more fully and uniformly, too.
I also arranged for plancache contexts to use the query source string
as their identifier. This is basically free for CachedPlanSources, as
they contained a copy of that string already. We pay an extra pstrdup
to do it for CachedPlans. That could perhaps be avoided, but it would
make things more fragile (since the CachedPlanSource is sometimes
destroyed first). I suspect future improvements in error reporting will
require CachedPlans to have a copy of that string anyway, so it's not
clear that it's worth moving mountains to avoid it now.
This also changes the APIs for context statistics routines so that the
context-specific routines no longer assume that output goes straight
to stderr, nor do they know all details of the output format. This
is useful immediately to reduce code duplication, and it also allows
for external code to do something with stats output that's different
from printing to stderr.
The reason for pushing this now rather than waiting for v12 is that
it rethinks some of the API changes made by commit 9fa6f00b1. Seems
better for extension authors to endure just one round of API changes
not two.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAB=Je-FdtmFZ9y9REHD7VsSrnCkiBhsA4mdsLKSPauwXtQBeNA@mail.gmail.com
This patch makes a number of interrelated changes to reduce the overhead
involved in creating/deleting memory contexts. The key ideas are:
* Include the AllocSetContext header of an aset.c context in its first
malloc request, rather than allocating it separately in TopMemoryContext.
This means that we now always create an initial or "keeper" block in an
aset, even if it never receives any allocation requests.
* Create freelists in which we can save and recycle recently-destroyed
asets (this idea is due to Robert Haas).
* In the common case where the name of a context is a constant string,
just store a pointer to it in the context header, rather than copying
the string.
The first change eliminates a palloc/pfree cycle per context, and
also avoids bloat in TopMemoryContext, at the price that creating
a context now involves a malloc/free cycle even if the context never
receives any allocations. That would be a loser for some common
usage patterns, but recycling short-lived contexts via the freelist
eliminates that pain.
Avoiding copying constant strings not only saves strlen() and strcpy()
overhead, but is an essential part of the freelist optimization because
it makes the context header size constant. Currently we make no
attempt to use the freelist for contexts with non-constant names.
(Perhaps someday we'll need to think harder about that, but in current
usage, most contexts with custom names are long-lived anyway.)
The freelist management in this initial commit is pretty simplistic,
and we might want to refine it later --- but in common workloads that
will never matter because the freelists will never get full anyway.
To create a context with a non-constant name, one is now required to
call AllocSetContextCreateExtended and specify the MEMCONTEXT_COPY_NAME
option. AllocSetContextCreate becomes a wrapper macro, and it includes
a test that will complain about non-string-literal context name
parameters on gcc and similar compilers.
An unfortunate side effect of making AllocSetContextCreate a macro is
that one is now *required* to use the size parameter abstraction macros
(ALLOCSET_DEFAULT_SIZES and friends) with it; the pre-9.6 habit of
writing out individual size parameters no longer works unless you
switch to AllocSetContextCreateExtended.
Internally to the memory-context-related modules, the context creation
APIs are simplified, removing the rather baroque original design whereby
a context-type module called mcxt.c which then called back into the
context-type module. That saved a bit of code duplication, but not much,
and it prevented context-type modules from exercising control over the
allocation of context headers.
In passing, I converted the test-and-elog validation of aset size
parameters into Asserts to save a few more cycles. The original thought
was that callers might compute size parameters on the fly, but in practice
nobody does that, so it's useless to expend cycles on checking those
numbers in production builds.
Also, mark the memory context method-pointer structs "const",
just for cleanliness.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2264.1512870796@sss.pgh.pa.us
Add commentary about what we're doing and why. Apply the method used for
padding in GenerationChunk to AllocChunkData, replacing the rather ad-hoc
solution used in commit 7e3aa03b4. Reorder fields in GenerationChunk so
that the padding calculation will work even if sizeof(size_t) is different
from sizeof(void *) --- likely that will never happen, but we don't need
the assumption if we do it like this. Improve static assertions about
alignment.
In passing, fix a couple of oversights in the "large chunk" path in
GenerationAlloc().
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1eHa4J-0006hI-Q8@gemulon.postgresql.org
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.
Commit e3860ffa4d wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code. The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there. BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs. So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before. This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.
Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
The new indent version includes numerous fixes thanks to Piotr Stefaniak.
The main changes visible in this commit are:
* Nicer formatting of function-pointer declarations.
* No longer unexpectedly removes spaces in expressions using casts,
sizeof, or offsetof.
* No longer wants to add a space in "struct structname *varname", as
well as some similar cases for const- or volatile-qualified pointers.
* Declarations using PG_USED_FOR_ASSERTS_ONLY are formatted more nicely.
* Fixes bug where comments following declarations were sometimes placed
with no space separating them from the code.
* Fixes some odd decisions for comments following case labels.
* Fixes some cases where comments following code were indented to less
than the expected column 33.
On the less good side, it now tends to put more whitespace around typedef
names that are not listed in typedefs.list. This might encourage us to
put more effort into typedef name collection; it's not really a bug in
indent itself.
There are more changes coming after this round, having to do with comment
indentation and alignment of lines appearing within parentheses. I wanted
to limit the size of the diffs to something that could be reviewed without
one's eyes completely glazing over, so it seemed better to split up the
changes as much as practical.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
During allocation VALGRIND_MAKE_MEM_DEFINED was called with a pointer
as size. That kind of works, but makes valgrind exceedingly slow for
workloads involving the slab allocator.
Secondly there was an access to memory marked as unreachable within
SlabCheck(). Fix that too.
Author: Tomas Vondra
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/a6543b6d-6015-99b1-63ef-3ed55a76a730@2ndquadrant.com
Compilers that don't realize that elog(ERROR) doesn't return
complained that SlabRealloc() failed to return a value.
While at it, fix the rather muddled header comment for the function.
Per buildfarm.
The new slab allocator needs different per-allocation information than
the classical aset.c. The definition in 58b25e981 wasn't sufficiently
careful on 32 platforms with 8 byte alignment, leading to buildfarm
failures. That's not entirely easy to fix by just adjusting the
definition.
As slab.c doesn't actually need the size part(s) of the common header,
all chunks are equally sized after all, it seems better to instead
reduce the header to the part needed by all allocators, namely which
context an allocation belongs to. That has the advantage of reducing
the overhead of slab allocations, and also allows for more flexibility
in future allocators.
To avoid spreading the logic about accessing a chunk's context around,
centralize it in GetMemoryChunkContext(), which allows to delete a
good number of lines.
A followup commit will revise the mmgr/README portion about
StandardChunkHeader, and more.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170228074420.aazv4iw6k562mnxg@alap3.anarazel.de
The default general purpose aset.c style memory context is not a great
choice for allocations that are all going to be evenly sized,
especially when those objects aren't small, and have varying
lifetimes. There tends to be a lot of fragmentation, larger
allocations always directly go to libc rather than have their cost
amortized over several pallocs.
These problems lead to the introduction of ad-hoc slab allocators in
reorderbuffer.c. But it turns out that the simplistic implementation
leads to problems when a lot of objects are allocated and freed, as
aset.c is still the underlying implementation. Especially freeing can
easily run into O(n^2) behavior in aset.c.
While the O(n^2) behavior in aset.c can, and probably will, be
addressed, custom allocators for this behavior are more efficient
both in space and time.
This allocator is for evenly sized allocations, and supports both
cheap allocations and freeing, without fragmenting significantly. It
does so by allocating evenly sized blocks via malloc(), and carves
them into chunks that can be used for allocations. In order to
release blocks to the OS as early as possible, chunks are allocated
from the fullest block that still has free objects, increasing the
likelihood of a block being entirely unused.
A subsequent commit uses this in reorderbuffer.c, but a further
allocator is needed to resolve the performance problems triggering
this work.
There likely are further potentialy uses of this allocator besides
reorderbuffer.c.
There's potential further optimizations of the new slab.c, in
particular the array of freelists could be replaced by a more
intelligent structure - but for now this looks more than good enough.
Author: Tomas Vondra, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund, Petr Jelinek, Robert Haas, Jim Nasby
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/d15dff83-0b37-28ed-0809-95a5cc7292ad@2ndquadrant.com
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Heikki Linnakangas
Andres Freund