were discussed last year, but we felt it was too late in the 8.3 cycle to
change the code immediately. Specifically, the patch:
* Reduces the minimum datum size to be considered for compression from
256 to 32 bytes, as suggested by Greg Stark.
* Increases the required compression rate for compressed storage from
20% to 25%, again per Greg's suggestion.
* Replaces force_input_size (size above which compression is forced)
with a maximum size to be considered for compression. It was agreed
that allowing large inputs to escape the minimum-compression-rate
requirement was not bright, and that indeed we'd rather have a knob
that acted in the other direction. I set this value to 1MB for the
moment, but it could use some performance studies to tune it.
* Adds an early-failure path to the compressor as suggested by Jan:
if it's been unable to find even one compressible substring in the
first 1KB (parameterizable), assume we're looking at incompressible
input and give up. (Possibly this logic can be improved, but I'll
commit it as-is for now.)
* Improves the toasting heuristics so that when we have very large
fields with attstorage 'x' or 'e', we will push those out to toast
storage before considering inline compression of shorter fields.
This also responds to a suggestion of Greg's, though my original
proposal for a solution was a bit off base because it didn't fix
the problem for large 'e' fields.
There was some discussion in the earlier threads of exposing some
of the compression knobs to users, perhaps even on a per-column
basis. I have not done anything about that here. It seems to me
that if we are changing around the parameters, we'd better get some
experience and be sure we are happy with the design before we set
things in stone by providing user-visible knobs.
temporary table; we can't support that because there's no way to clean up the
source backend's internal state if the eventual COMMIT PREPARED is done by
another backend. This was checked correctly in 8.1 but I broke it in 8.2 :-(.
Patch by Heikki Linnakangas, original trouble report by John Smith.
is also licensed to put a local variable declared that way at an unaligned
address. Which will not work if the variable is then manipulated with
SET_VARSIZE or other macros that assume alignment. So the previous patch
is not an unalloyed good, but on balance I think it's still a win, since
we have very few places that do that sort of thing. Fix the one place in
tuptoaster.c that does it. Per buildfarm results from gypsy_moth
(I'm a bit surprised that only one machine showed a failure).
represented as "char ...[4]" not "int32". Since the length word is never
supposed to be accessed via this struct member anyway, this won't break
any existing code that is following the rules. The advantage is that C
compilers will no longer assume that a pointer to struct varlena is
word-aligned, which prevents incorrect optimizations in TOAST-pointer
access and perhaps other places. gcc doesn't seem to do this (at least
not at -O2), but the problem is demonstrable on some other compilers.
I changed struct inet as well, but didn't bother to touch a lot of other
struct definitions in which it wouldn't make any difference because there
were other fields forcing int alignment anyway. Hopefully none of those
struct definitions are used for accessing unaligned Datums.
its second pass over the table. It has to start at block zero, else the
"merge join" logic for detecting which TIDs are already in the index
doesn't work. Hence, extend heapam.c's API so that callers can enable or
disable syncscan. (I put in an option to disable buffer access strategy,
too, just in case somebody needs it.) Per report from Hannes Dorbath.
but no database changes have been made since the last CommandCounterIncrement.
This should result in a significant improvement in the number of "commands"
that can typically be performed within a transaction before hitting the 2^32
CommandId size limit. In particular this buys back (and more) the possible
adverse consequences of my previous patch to fix plan caching behavior.
The implementation requires tracking whether the current CommandCounter
value has been "used" to mark any tuples. CommandCounter values stored into
snapshots are presumed not to be used for this purpose. This requires some
small executor changes, since the executor used to conflate the curcid of
the snapshot it was using with the command ID to mark output tuples with.
Separating these concepts allows some small simplifications in executor APIs.
Something for the TODO list: look into having CommandCounterIncrement not do
AcceptInvalidationMessages. It seems fairly bogus to be doing it there,
but exactly where to do it instead isn't clear, and I'm disinclined to mess
with asynchronous behavior during late beta.
when relkind = RELKIND_RELATION. This syncs these tests with the Asserts
in tuptoaster.c, and ensures that we won't ever try to, for example,
compress a sequence's tuple. Problem found by Greg Stark while stress-testing
with much-smaller-than-normal page sizes.
compiler --- at least on ARM, it does. I suspect that the varvarlena patch
has been creating larger-than-intended toast pointers all along on ARM,
but it wasn't exposed until the latest tweak added some Asserts that
calculated the expected size in a different way. We could probably have
fixed this by adding __attribute__((packed)) as is done for ItemPointerData,
but struct varattrib_pointer isn't really all that useful anyway, so it
seems cleanest to just get rid of it and have only struct varattrib_1b_e.
Per results from buildfarm member quagga.
explicitly. This means a TOAST pointer takes 18 bytes instead of 17 --- still
smaller than in 8.2 --- which seems a good tradeoff to ensure we won't have
painted ourselves into a corner if we want to support multiple types of TOAST
pointer later on. Per discussion with Greg Stark.
decompression of an already-compressed external value when we have to copy
it; save a few cycles when a value is too short for compression; and
annotate various lines that are currently unreachable.
unpruned XMAX in its header. At the cost of 4 bytes per page, this keeps us
from performing heap_page_prune when there's no chance of pruning anything.
Seems to be necessary per Heikki's preliminary performance testing.
columns, and the new version can be stored on the same heap page, we no longer
generate extra index entries for the new version. Instead, index searches
follow the HOT-chain links to ensure they find the correct tuple version.
In addition, this patch introduces the ability to "prune" dead tuples on a
per-page basis, without having to do a complete VACUUM pass to recover space.
VACUUM is still needed to clean up dead index entries, however.
Pavan Deolasee, with help from a bunch of other people.
than two independent bits (one of which was never used in heap pages anyway,
or at least hadn't been in a very long time). This gives us flexibility to
add the HOT notions of redirected and dead item pointers without requiring
anything so klugy as magic values of lp_off and lp_len. The state values
are chosen so that for the states currently in use (pre-HOT) there is no
change in the physical representation.
no need for serialization against snapshot-taking because the xact doesn't
affect anyone else's snapshot anyway. Per discussion. Also, move various
info about the interlocking of transactions and snapshots out of code comments
and into a hopefully-more-cohesive discussion in access/transam/README.
Also, remove a couple of now-obsolete comments about having to force some WAL
to be written to persuade RecordTransactionCommit to do its thing.
rows will normally never obtain an XID at all. We already did things this way
for subtransactions, but this patch extends the concept to top-level
transactions. In applications where there are lots of short read-only
transactions, this should improve performance noticeably; not so much from
removal of the actual XID-assignments, as from reduction of overhead that's
driven by the rate of XID consumption. We add a concept of a "virtual
transaction ID" so that active transactions can be uniquely identified even
if they don't have a regular XID. This is a much lighter-weight concept:
uniqueness of VXIDs is only guaranteed over the short term, and no on-disk
record is made about them.
Florian Pflug, with some editorialization by Tom.
that still thought they could set HEAP_XMAX_COMMITTED immediately after
seeing the other transaction commit. Make them use the same logic as
tqual.c does to determine if the hint bit can be set yet.
pseudo HeapScanDesc created for a bitmap heap scan. This avoids some useless
overhead during a bitmap scan startup, in particular invoking the syncscan
code. (We might someday want to do that, but right now it's merely useless
contention for shared memory, to say nothing of possibly pushing useful
entries out of syncscan's small LRU list.) This also allows elimination of
ugly pgstat_discount_heap_scan() kluge.
buffers, rather than blowing out the whole shared-buffer arena. Aside from
avoiding cache spoliation, this fixes the problem that VACUUM formerly tended
to cause a WAL flush for every page it modified, because we had it hacked to
use only a single buffer. Those flushes will now occur only once per
ring-ful. The exact ring size, and the threshold for seqscans to switch into
the ring usage pattern, remain under debate; but the infrastructure seems
done. The key bit of infrastructure is a new optional BufferAccessStrategy
object that can be passed to ReadBuffer operations; this replaces the former
StrategyHintVacuum API.
This patch also changes the buffer usage-count methodology a bit: we now
advance usage_count when first pinning a buffer, rather than when last
unpinning it. To preserve the behavior that a buffer's lifetime starts to
decrease when it's released, the clock sweep code is modified to not decrement
usage_count of pinned buffers.
Work not done in this commit: teach GiST and GIN indexes to use the vacuum
BufferAccessStrategy for vacuum-driven fetches.
Original patch by Simon, reworked by Heikki and again by Tom.
and aborted transactions have different effects; also teach it not to assume
that prepared transactions are always committed.
Along the way, simplify the pgstats API by tying counting directly to
Relations; I cannot detect any redeeming social value in having stats
pointers in HeapScanDesc and IndexScanDesc structures. And fix a few
corner cases in which counts might be missed because the relation's
pgstat_info pointer hadn't been set.
to avoid losing useful Xid information in not-so-old tuples. This makes
CLUSTER behave the same as VACUUM as far a tuple-freezing behavior goes
(though CLUSTER does not yet advance the table's relfrozenxid).
While at it, move the actual freezing operation in rewriteheap.c to a more
appropriate place, and document it thoroughly. This part of the patch from
Tom Lane.
applied to live tuples older than a recent Xmin, not to tuples that may be part
of an update chain. Those still keep their original markings.
This patch makes it possible for CLUSTER to advance relfrozenxid, thus avoiding
the need of vacuuming the table for Xid wraparound purposes. That will be
patched separately.
Patch from Heikki Linnakangas.
This commit breaks any code that assumes that the mere act of forming a tuple
(without writing it to disk) does not "toast" any fields. While all available
regression tests pass, I'm not totally sure that we've fixed every nook and
cranny, especially in contrib.
Greg Stark with some help from Tom Lane
Add the latter to the values checked in pg_control, since it can't be changed
without invalidating toast table content. This commit in itself shouldn't
change any behavior, but it lays some necessary groundwork for experimentation
with these toast-control numbers.
Note: while TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD can now be changed without initdb, some
thought still needs to be given to needs_toast_table() in toasting.c before
unleashing random changes.
pointer" in every Snapshot struct. This allows removal of the case-by-case
tests in HeapTupleSatisfiesVisibility, which should make it a bit faster
(I didn't try any performance tests though). More importantly, we are no
longer violating portable C practices by assuming that small integers are
distinct from all pointer values, and HeapTupleSatisfiesDirty no longer
has a non-reentrant API involving side-effects on a global variable.
There were a couple of places calling HeapTupleSatisfiesXXX routines
directly rather than through the HeapTupleSatisfiesVisibility macro.
Since these places had to be changed anyway, I chose to make them go
through the macro for uniformity.
Along the way I renamed HeapTupleSatisfiesSnapshot to HeapTupleSatisfiesMVCC
to emphasize that it's only used with MVCC-type snapshots. I was sorely
tempted to rename HeapTupleSatisfiesVisibility to HeapTupleSatisfiesSnapshot,
but forebore for the moment to avoid confusion and reduce the likelihood that
this patch breaks some of the pending patches. Might want to reconsider
doing that later.
Get rid of VARATT_SIZE and VARATT_DATA, which were simply redundant with
VARSIZE and VARDATA, and as a consequence almost no code was using the
longer names. Rename the length fields of struct varlena and various
derived structures to catch anyplace that was accessing them directly;
and clean up various places so caught. In itself this patch doesn't
change any behavior at all, but it is necessary infrastructure if we hope
to play any games with the representation of varlena headers.
Greg Stark and Tom Lane
keeping private state in each backend that has inserted and deleted the same
tuple during its current top-level transaction. This is sufficient since
there is no need to be able to determine the cmin/cmax from any other
transaction. This gets us back down to 23-byte headers, removing a penalty
paid in 8.0 to support subtransactions. Patch by Heikki Linnakangas, with
minor revisions by moi, following a design hashed out awhile back on the
pghackers list.
describe the maximum size of index tuples (which is typically AM-dependent
anyway); and consequently remove the bogus deduction for "special space"
that was built into it.
Adjust TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD and TOAST_MAX_CHUNK_SIZE to avoid wasting two
bytes per toast chunk, and to ensure that the calculation correctly tracks any
future changes in page header size. The computation had been inaccurate in a
way that didn't cause any harm except space wastage, but future changes could
have broken it more drastically.
Fix the calculation of BTMaxItemSize, which was formerly computed as 1 byte
more than it could safely be. This didn't cause any harm in practice because
it's only compared against maxalign'd lengths, but future changes in the size
of page headers or btree special space could have exposed the problem.
initdb forced because of change in TOAST_MAX_CHUNK_SIZE, which alters the
storage of toast tables.
threshold for tuple length. On 4-byte-MAXALIGN machines, the toast code
creates tuples that have t_len exactly TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD ... but this
number is not itself maxaligned, so if heap_insert maxaligns t_len before
comparing to TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD, it'll uselessly recurse back to
tuptoaster.c, wasting cycles. (It turns out that this does not happen on
8-byte-MAXALIGN machines, because for them the outer MAXALIGN in the
TOAST_MAX_CHUNK_SIZE macro reduces TOAST_MAX_CHUNK_SIZE so that toast tuples
will be less than TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD in size. That MAXALIGN is really
incorrect, but we can't remove it now, see below.) There isn't any particular
value in maxaligning before comparing to the thresholds, so just don't do
that, which saves a small number of cycles in itself.
These numbers should be rejiggered to minimize wasted space on toast-relation
pages, but we can't do that in the back branches because changing
TOAST_MAX_CHUNK_SIZE would force an initdb (by changing the contents of toast
tables). We can move the toast decision thresholds a bit, though, which is
what this patch effectively does.
Thanks to Pavan Deolasee for discovering the unintended recursion.
Back-patch into 8.2, but not further, pending more testing. (HEAD is about
to get a further patch modifying the thresholds, so it won't help much
for testing this form of the patch.)
cases where we already hold the desired lock "indirectly", either via
membership in a MultiXact or because the lock was originally taken by a
different subtransaction of the current transaction. These cases must be
accounted for to avoid needless deadlocks and/or inappropriate replacement of
an exclusive lock with a shared lock. Per report from Clarence Gardner and
subsequent investigation.
in PITR scenarios. We now WAL-log the replacement of old XIDs with
FrozenTransactionId, so that such replacement is guaranteed to propagate to
PITR slave databases. Also, rather than relying on hint-bit updates to be
preserved, pg_clog is not truncated until all instances of an XID are known to
have been replaced by FrozenTransactionId. Add new GUC variables and
pg_autovacuum columns to allow management of the freezing policy, so that
users can trade off the size of pg_clog against the amount of freezing work
done. Revise the already-existing code that forces autovacuum of tables
approaching the wraparound point to make it more bulletproof; also, revise the
autovacuum logic so that anti-wraparound vacuuming is done per-table rather
than per-database. initdb forced because of changes in pg_class, pg_database,
and pg_autovacuum catalogs. Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, and Tom Lane.
remaining functions, simplify pglz_compress's API to not require a useless
data copy when compression fails. Also add a check in pglz_decompress that
the expected amount of data was decompressed.
