buffer manager with 'pg_clog', a specialized access method modeled
on pg_xlog. This simplifies startup (don't need to play games to
open pg_log; among other things, OverrideTransactionSystem goes away),
should improve performance a little, and opens the door to recycling
commit log space by removing no-longer-needed segments of the commit
log. Actual recycling is not there yet, but I felt I should commit
this part separately since it'd still be useful if we chose not to
do transaction ID wraparound.
in GetSnapshotData, GetNewTransactionId, CommitTransaction, AbortTransaction,
etc. Correct race condition in transaction status testing in
HeapTupleSatisfiesVacuum --- this wasn't important for old VACUUM with
exclusive lock on its table, but it sure is important now. All per
pghackers discussion 7/11/01 and 7/12/01.
validity checking rules for VACUUM. Make some other rearrangements of the
VACUUM code to allow more code to be shared between full and lazy VACUUM.
Minor code cleanups and added comments for TransactionId manipulations.
2. Much faster btree tuples deletion in the case when first on page
index tuple is deleted (no movement to the left page(s)).
3. Remember blkno of new root page in BTPageOpaque of
left/right siblings when root page is splitted.
no longer returns buffer pointer, can be gotten from scan;
descriptor; bootstrap can create multi-key indexes;
pg_procname index now is multi-key index; oidint2, oidint4, oidname
are gone (must be removed from regression tests); use System Cache
rather than sequential scan in many places; heap_modifytuple no
longer takes buffer parameter; remove unused buffer parameter in
a few other functions; oid8 is not index-able; remove some use of
single-character variable names; cleanup Buffer variables usage
and scan descriptor looping; cleaned up allocation and freeing of
tuples; 18k lines of diff;
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.
