Since hash indexes typically have very few overflow pages, adding a
new splitpoint essentially doubles the on-disk size of the index,
which can lead to large and abrupt increases in disk usage (and
perhaps long delays on occasion). To mitigate this problem to some
degree, divide larger splitpoints into four equal phases. This means
that, for example, instead of growing from 4GB to 8GB all at once, a
hash index will now grow from 4GB to 5GB to 6GB to 7GB to 8GB, which
is perhaps still not as smooth as we'd like but certainly an
improvement.
This changes the on-disk format of the metapage, so bump HASH_VERSION
from 2 to 3. This will force a REINDEX of all existing hash indexes,
but that's probably a good idea anyway. First, hash indexes from
pre-10 versions of PostgreSQL could easily be corrupted, and we don't
want to confuse corruption carried over from an older release with any
corruption caused despite the new write-ahead logging in v10. Second,
it will let us remove some backward-compatibility code added by commit
293e24e507.
Mithun Cy, reviewed by Amit Kapila, Jesper Pedersen and me. Regression
test outputs updated by me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAD__OuhG6F1gQLCgMQNnMNgoCvOLQZz9zKYJQNYvYmmJoM42gA@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoYty0jCf-pa+m+vYUJ716+AxM7nv_syvyanyf5O-L_i2A@mail.gmail.com
The warning about hash indexes not being write-ahead logged and their
use being discouraged has been removed. "snapshot too old" is now
supported for tables with hash indexes. Most importantly, barring
bugs, hash indexes will now be crash-safe and usable on standbys.
This commit doesn't yet add WAL consistency checking for hash
indexes, as we now have for other index types; a separate patch has
been submitted to cure that lack.
Amit Kapila, reviewed and slightly modified by me. The larger patch
series of which this is a part has been reviewed and tested by Álvaro
Herrera, Ashutosh Sharma, Mark Kirkwood, Jeff Janes, and Jesper
Pedersen.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAA4eK1JOBX=YU33631Qh-XivYXtPSALh514+jR8XeD7v+K3r_Q@mail.gmail.com
It did that to verify that the page was an overflow page rather than
anything else, but that means that checking the status of all the
overflow bits requires reading the entire index. So don't do that.
The new code validates that the page is not a primary bucket page
or bitmap page by looking at the metapage, so that using this on
large numbers of pages can be reasonably efficient.
Ashutosh Sharma, per a complaint from me, and with further
modifications by me.
This avoids a very significant amount of buffer manager traffic and
contention when scanning hash indexes, because it's no longer
necessary to lock and pin the metapage for every scan. We do need
some way of figuring out when the cache is too stale to use any more,
so that when we lock the primary bucket page to which the cached
metapage points us, we can tell whether a split has occurred since we
cached the metapage data. To do that, we use the hash_prevblkno field
in the primary bucket page, which would otherwise always be set to
InvalidBuffer.
This patch contains code so that it will continue working (although
less efficiently) with hash indexes built before this change, but
perhaps we should consider bumping the hash version and ripping out
the compatibility code. That decision can be made later, though.
Mithun Cy, reviewed by Jesper Pedersen, Amit Kapila, and by me.
Before committing, I made a number of cosmetic changes to the last
posted version of the patch, adjusted _hash_getcachedmetap to be more
careful about order of operation, and made some necessary updates to
the pageinspect documentation and regression tests.
Per a report from Tom Lane, the ffactor reported by hash_metapage_info
and the free_size reported by hash_page_stats vary by platform.
Ashutosh Sharma and Robert Haas
Patch by Jesper Pedersen and Ashutosh Sharma, with some error handling
improvements by me. Tests from Peter Eisentraut. Reviewed by Álvaro
Herrera, Michael Paquier, Jesper Pedersen, Jeff Janes, Peter
Eisentraut, Amit Kapila, Mithun Cy, and me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/e2ac6c58-b93f-9dd9-f4e6-d6d30add7fdf@redhat.com
Robert Haas