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.
d526575f89