This patch makes a number of interrelated changes to reduce the overhead
involved in creating/deleting memory contexts. The key ideas are:
* Include the AllocSetContext header of an aset.c context in its first
malloc request, rather than allocating it separately in TopMemoryContext.
This means that we now always create an initial or "keeper" block in an
aset, even if it never receives any allocation requests.
* Create freelists in which we can save and recycle recently-destroyed
asets (this idea is due to Robert Haas).
* In the common case where the name of a context is a constant string,
just store a pointer to it in the context header, rather than copying
the string.
The first change eliminates a palloc/pfree cycle per context, and
also avoids bloat in TopMemoryContext, at the price that creating
a context now involves a malloc/free cycle even if the context never
receives any allocations. That would be a loser for some common
usage patterns, but recycling short-lived contexts via the freelist
eliminates that pain.
Avoiding copying constant strings not only saves strlen() and strcpy()
overhead, but is an essential part of the freelist optimization because
it makes the context header size constant. Currently we make no
attempt to use the freelist for contexts with non-constant names.
(Perhaps someday we'll need to think harder about that, but in current
usage, most contexts with custom names are long-lived anyway.)
The freelist management in this initial commit is pretty simplistic,
and we might want to refine it later --- but in common workloads that
will never matter because the freelists will never get full anyway.
To create a context with a non-constant name, one is now required to
call AllocSetContextCreateExtended and specify the MEMCONTEXT_COPY_NAME
option. AllocSetContextCreate becomes a wrapper macro, and it includes
a test that will complain about non-string-literal context name
parameters on gcc and similar compilers.
An unfortunate side effect of making AllocSetContextCreate a macro is
that one is now *required* to use the size parameter abstraction macros
(ALLOCSET_DEFAULT_SIZES and friends) with it; the pre-9.6 habit of
writing out individual size parameters no longer works unless you
switch to AllocSetContextCreateExtended.
Internally to the memory-context-related modules, the context creation
APIs are simplified, removing the rather baroque original design whereby
a context-type module called mcxt.c which then called back into the
context-type module. That saved a bit of code duplication, but not much,
and it prevented context-type modules from exercising control over the
allocation of context headers.
In passing, I converted the test-and-elog validation of aset size
parameters into Asserts to save a few more cycles. The original thought
was that callers might compute size parameters on the fly, but in practice
nobody does that, so it's useless to expend cycles on checking those
numbers in production builds.
Also, mark the memory context method-pointer structs "const",
just for cleanliness.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2264.1512870796@sss.pgh.pa.us
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.
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