"Blind writes" are a mechanism to push buffers down to disk when
evicting them; since they may belong to different databases than the one
a backend is connected to, the backend does not necessarily have a
relation to link them to, and thus no way to blow them away. We were
keeping those files open indefinitely, which would cause a problem if
the underlying table was deleted, because the operating system would not
be able to reclaim the disk space used by those files.
To fix, have bufmgr mark such files as transient to smgr; the lower
layer is allowed to close the file descriptor when the current
transaction ends. We must be careful to have any other access of the
file to remove the transient markings, to prevent unnecessary expensive
system calls when evicting buffers belonging to our own database (which
files we're likely to require again soon.)
all the data and using posix_fadvise to nudge the OS into flushing it
earlier. This also hopefully makes CREATE DATABASE avoid spamming the
cache.
Tests show a big speedup on Linux at least on some filesystems.
Idea and patch from Andres Freund.
fsync() fails, say "file" rather than "relation" when printing the filename.
This makes messages that display block numbers a bit confusing. For example,
in message 'could not read block 150000 of file "base/1234/5678.1"', 150000
is the block number from the beginning of the relation, ie. segment 0, not
150000th block within that segment. Per discussion, users aren't usually
interested in the exact location within the file, so we can live with that.
To ease constructing error messages, add FilePathName(File) function to
return the pathname of a virtual fd.
GUC variable effective_io_concurrency controls how many concurrent block
prefetch requests will be issued.
(The best way to handle this for plain index scans is still under debate,
so that part is not applied yet --- tgl)
Greg Stark
than dividing them into 1GB segments as has been our longtime practice. This
requires working support for large files in the operating system; at least for
the time being, it won't be the default.
Zdenek Kotala
with the recent patch to log temp file sizes at removal time. Doesn't seem
worth fixing since it's unused.
In passing, make a few elog messages conform to the message style guide.
for each temp file, rather than once per sort or hashjoin; this allows
spreading the data of a large sort or join across multiple tablespaces.
(I remain dubious that this will make any difference in practice, but certain
people insisted.) Arrange to cache the results of parsing the GUC variable
instead of recomputing from scratch on every demand, and push usage of the
cache down to the bottommost fd.c level.
tablespace(s) in which to store temp tables and temporary files. This is a
list to allow spreading the load across multiple tablespaces (a random list
element is chosen each time a temp object is to be created). Temp files are
not stored in per-database pgsql_tmp/ directories anymore, but per-tablespace
directories.
Jaime Casanova and Albert Cervera, with review by Bernd Helmle and Tom Lane.
exit, instead of trying to take shortcuts. Introduce some additional
shutdown callback routines to eliminate kluges like having ProcKill
be responsible for shutting down the buffer manager. Ensure that the
order of operations during shutdown is predictable and what you would
expect given the module layering.
includes error checking and an appropriate ereport(ERROR) message.
This gets rid of rather tedious and error-prone manipulation of errno,
as well as a Windows-specific bug workaround, at more than a dozen
call sites. After an idea in a recent patch by Heikki Linnakangas.
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 ...
as per recent discussions. Invent SubTransactionIds that are managed like
CommandIds (ie, counter is reset at start of each top transaction), and
use these instead of TransactionIds to keep track of subtransaction status
in those modules that need it. This means that a subtransaction does not
need an XID unless it actually inserts/modifies rows in the database.
Accordingly, don't assign it an XID nor take a lock on the XID until it
tries to do that. This saves a lot of overhead for subtransactions that
are only used for error recovery (eg plpgsql exceptions). Also, arrange
to release a subtransaction's XID lock as soon as the subtransaction
exits, in both the commit and abort cases. This avoids holding many
unique locks after a long series of subtransactions. The price is some
additional overhead in XactLockTableWait, but that seems acceptable.
Finally, restructure the state machine in xact.c to have a more orthogonal
set of states for subtransactions.
password/group files. Also allow read-only subtransactions of a read-write
parent, but not vice versa. These are the reasonably noncontroversial
parts of Alvaro's recent mop-up patch, plus further work on large objects
to minimize use of the TopTransactionResourceOwner.
explicitly fsync'ing every (non-temp) file we have written since the
last checkpoint. In the vast majority of cases, the burden of the
fsyncs should fall on the bgwriter process not on backends. (To this
end, we assume that an fsync issued by the bgwriter will force out
blocks written to the same file by other processes using other file
descriptors. Anyone have a problem with that?) This makes the world
safe for WIN32, which ain't even got sync(2), and really makes the world
safe for Unixen as well, because sync(2) never had the semantics we need:
it offers no way to wait for the requested I/O to finish.
Along the way, fix a bug I recently introduced in xlog recovery:
file truncation replay failed to clear bufmgr buffers for the dropped
blocks, which could result in 'PANIC: heap_delete_redo: no block'
later on in xlog replay.
and FreeDir routines modeled on the existing AllocateFile/FreeFile.
Like the latter, these routines will avoid failing on EMFILE/ENFILE
conditions whenever possible, and will prevent leakage of directory
descriptors if an elog() occurs while one is open.
Also, reduce PANIC to ERROR in MoveOfflineLogs() --- this is not
critical code and there is no reason to force a DB restart on failure.
All per recent trouble report from Olivier Hubaut.
number of openable files and the number already opened. This eliminates
depending on sysconf(_SC_OPEN_MAX), and allows much saner behavior on
platforms where open-file slots are used up by semaphores.
(materialization into a tuple store) discussed on pgsql-hackers earlier.
I've updated the documentation and the regression tests.
Notes on the implementation:
- I needed to change the tuple store API slightly -- it assumes that it
won't be used to hold data across transaction boundaries, so the temp
files that it uses for on-disk storage are automatically reclaimed at
end-of-transaction. I added a flag to tuplestore_begin_heap() to control
this behavior. Is changing the tuple store API in this fashion OK?
- in order to store executor results in a tuple store, I added a new
CommandDest. This works well for the most part, with one exception: the
current DestFunction API doesn't provide enough information to allow the
Executor to store results into an arbitrary tuple store (where the
particular tuple store to use is chosen by the call site of
ExecutorRun). To workaround this, I've temporarily hacked up a solution
that works, but is not ideal: since the receiveTuple DestFunction is
passed the portal name, we can use that to lookup the Portal data
structure for the cursor and then use that to get at the tuple store the
Portal is using. This unnecessarily ties the Portal code with the
tupleReceiver code, but it works...
The proper fix for this is probably to change the DestFunction API --
Tom suggested passing the full QueryDesc to the receiveTuple function.
In that case, callers of ExecutorRun could "subclass" QueryDesc to add
any additional fields that their particular CommandDest needed to get
access to. This approach would work, but I'd like to think about it for
a little bit longer before deciding which route to go. In the mean time,
the code works fine, so I don't think a fix is urgent.
- (semi-related) I added a NO SCROLL keyword to DECLARE CURSOR, and
adjusted the behavior of SCROLL in accordance with the discussion on
-hackers.
- (unrelated) Cleaned up some SGML markup in sql.sgml, copy.sgml
Neil Conway
The local buffer manager is no longer used for newly-created relations
(unless they are TEMP); a new non-TEMP relation goes through the shared
bufmgr and thus will participate normally in checkpoints. But TEMP relations
use the local buffer manager throughout their lifespan. Also, operations
in TEMP relations are not logged in WAL, thus improving performance.
Since it's no longer necessary to fsync relations as they move out of the
local buffers into shared buffers, quite a lot of smgr.c/md.c/fd.c code
is no longer needed and has been removed: there's no concept of a dirty
relation anymore in md.c/fd.c, and we never fsync anything but WAL.
Still TODO: improve local buffer management algorithms so that it would
be reasonable to increase NLocBuffer.
upper limit on what we will believe from sysconf(_SC_OPEN_MAX). The
default value is 1000, so that under ordinary conditions it won't
affect the behavior. But on platforms where the kernel promises far
more than it can deliver, this can be used to prevent running out of
file descriptors. See numerous past discussions, eg, pgsql-hackers
around 23-Dec-2000.
directory (which can be made a symlink to put temp files on another disk).
Add code to delete leftover temp files during postmaster startup.
Bruce, with some kibitzing from Tom.
Python) to support shared extension modules, I have learned that Guido
prefers the style of the attached patch to solve the above problem.
I feel that this solution is particularly appropriate in this case
because the following:
PglargeType
PgType
PgQueryType
are already being handled in the way that I am proposing for PgSourceType.
Jason Tishler
waste of cycles on single-CPU machines, and of dubious utility on multi-CPU
machines too.
Tweak s_lock_stuck so that caller can specify timeout interval, and
increase interval before declaring stuck spinlock for buffer locks and XLOG
locks.
On systems that have fdatasync(), use that rather than fsync() to sync WAL
log writes. Ensure that WAL file is entirely allocated during XLogFileInit.
it will close VFDs if necessary to surmount ENFILE or EMFILE failures.
Make use of this in md.c, xlog.c, and user.c routines that were
formerly vulnerable to these failures. In particular, this should
handle failures of mdblindwrt() that have been observed under heavy
load conditions. (By golly, every other process on the system may
crash after Postgres eats up all the kernel FDs, but Postgres will
keep going!)
as a shared dirtybit for each shared buffer. The shared dirtybit still
controls writing the buffer, but the local bit controls whether we need
to fsync the buffer's file. This arrangement fixes a bug that allowed
some required fsyncs to be missed, and should improve performance as well.
For more info see my post of same date on pghackers.
BufFile so that it handles multi-segment temporary files transparently.
This allows sorts and hashes to work with data exceeding 2Gig (or whatever
the local limit on file size is). Change psort.c to use relative seeks
instead of absolute seeks for backwards scanning, so that it won't fail
when the data volume exceeds 2Gig.
files to be closed automatically at transaction abort or commit, should
they still be open. Also close any still-open stdio files allocated with
AllocateFile at abort/commit. This should eliminate problems with leakage
of file descriptors after an error. Also, put in some primitive buffered-IO
support so that psort.c can use virtual files without severe performance
penalties.