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 new style of memory allocator, known as Generational
appropriate for use in cases where memory is allocated
and then freed in roughly oldest first order (FIFO).
Use new allocator for logical decoding’s reorderbuffer
to significantly reduce memory usage and improve performance.
Author: Tomas Vondra
Reviewed-by: Simon Riggs
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
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
The single linked list of memory contexts could result in O(N^2)
performance to free a set of contexts if they were not freed in
reverse order of creation. In many cases the reverse order was
used, but there were some significant exceptions that caused real-
world performance problems. Rather than requiring all callers to
care about the order in which contexts were freed, and hunting down
and changing all existing cases where the wrong order was used, we
add one pointer per memory context so that the implementation
details are not so visible.
Jan Wieck
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.
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.
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.
avoids the overhead of one function call when calling MemoryContextReset(),
and it seems like the isReset optimization would be applicable to any new
memory context we might invent in the future anyway.
This buys back the overhead I just added in previous patch to always call
MemoryContextReset() in ExecScan, even when there's no quals or projections.
This alters various incidental uses of C++ key words to use other similar
identifiers, so that a C++ compiler won't choke outright. You still
(probably) need extern "C" { }; around the inclusion of backend headers.
based on a patch by Kurt Harriman <harriman@acm.org>
Also add a script cpluspluscheck to check for C++ compatibility in the
future. As of right now, this passes without error for me.
child memory contexts is indented two spaces to the right of its
parent context. This should make it easier to deduce the memory
context hierarchy from the output of MemoryContextStats().
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 ...
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..
not-very-good handling of mid-size allocation requests. Do everything via
either the "small" case (chunk size rounded up to power of 2) or the "large"
case (pass it straight off to malloc()). Increase the number of freelists
a little to set the breakpoint between these behaviors at 8K.
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
for details). It doesn't really do that much yet, since there are no
short-term memory contexts in the executor, but the infrastructure is
in place and long-term contexts are handled reasonably. A few long-
standing bugs have been fixed, such as 'VACUUM; anything' in a single
query string crashing. Also, out-of-memory is now considered a
recoverable ERROR, not FATAL.
Eliminate a large amount of crufty, now-dead code in and around
memory management.
Fix problem with holding off SIGTRAP, SIGSEGV, etc in postmaster and
backend startup.
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Simon Riggs
Andres Freund
Kevin Grittner
Heikki Linnakangas
Magnus Hagander
Peter Eisentraut
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon
Jan Wieck