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Andres Freund 58b25e9810 Add "Slab" MemoryContext implementation for efficient equal-sized allocations.
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
2017-02-27 03:41:44 -08:00
config Remove some configure header-file checks that we weren't really using. 2017-02-25 18:10:09 -05:00
contrib Remove useless duplicate inclusions of system header files. 2017-02-25 16:12:55 -05:00
doc Clarify the role of checkpoint at the begininng of base backups 2017-02-26 21:31:54 +01:00
src Add "Slab" MemoryContext implementation for efficient equal-sized allocations. 2017-02-27 03:41:44 -08:00
.dir-locals.el emacs: Set indent-tabs-mode in perl-mode 2015-04-12 23:53:23 -04:00
.gitattributes Remove contrib/tsearch2. 2017-02-13 11:06:11 -05:00
.gitignore Allow .so minor version numbers above 9 in .gitignore. 2016-08-15 17:35:35 -04:00
COPYRIGHT Update copyright for 2017 2017-01-03 12:37:53 -05:00
GNUmakefile.in Have "make coverage" recurse into contrib as well 2016-09-05 18:44:36 -03:00
HISTORY Improve text of stub HISTORY file. 2014-02-12 18:16:17 -05:00
Makefile Allow make check in PL directories 2011-02-15 06:52:12 +02:00
README Don't generate plain-text HISTORY and src/test/regress/README anymore. 2014-02-10 20:48:04 -05:00
README.git Don't generate plain-text HISTORY and src/test/regress/README anymore. 2014-02-10 20:48:04 -05:00
aclocal.m4 Replace our hacked version of ax_pthread.m4 with latest upstream version. 2015-07-08 20:36:06 +03:00
configure Remove some configure header-file checks that we weren't really using. 2017-02-25 18:10:09 -05:00
configure.in Remove some configure header-file checks that we weren't really using. 2017-02-25 18:10:09 -05:00

README

PostgreSQL Database Management System
=====================================

This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including
transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types
and functions.  This distribution also contains C language bindings.

PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here:

	http://www.postgresql.org/download

See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install
PostgreSQL.  That file also lists supported operating systems and
hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other
software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL
system.  Copyright and license information can be found in the
file COPYRIGHT.  A comprehensive documentation set is included in this
distribution; it can be read as described in the installation
instructions.

The latest version of this software may be obtained at
http://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.