In all branches back to 8.3, this patch fixes a questionable assumption in
CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue that there are
no uninitialized pad bytes in the request queue structs. This would only
cause trouble if (a) there were such pad bytes, which could happen in 8.4
and up if the compiler makes enum ForkNumber narrower than 32 bits, but
otherwise would require not-currently-planned changes in the widths of
other typedefs; and (b) the kernel has not uniformly initialized the
contents of shared memory to zeroes. Still, it seems a tad risky, and we
can easily remove any risk by pre-zeroing the request array for ourselves.
In addition to that, we need to establish a coding rule that struct
RelFileNode can't contain any padding bytes, since such structs are copied
into the request array verbatim. (There are other places that are assuming
this anyway, it turns out.)
In 9.1 and up, the risk was a bit larger because we were also effectively
assuming that struct RelFileNodeBackend contained no pad bytes, and with
fields of different types in there, that would be much easier to break.
However, there is no good reason to ever transmit fsync or delete requests
for temp files to the bgwriter/checkpointer, so we can revert the request
structs to plain RelFileNode, getting rid of the padding risk and saving
some marginal number of bytes and cycles in fsync queue manipulation while
we are at it. The savings might be more than marginal during deletion of
a temp relation, because the old code transmitted an entirely useless but
nonetheless expensive-to-process ForgetRelationFsync request to the
background process, and also had the background process perform the file
deletion even though that can safely be done immediately.
In addition, make some cleanup of nearby comments and small improvements to
the code in CompactCheckpointerRequestQueue/CompactBgwriterRequestQueue.
This provides a speedup of about 4X when NBuffers is large enough.
There is also a useful reduction in sinval traffic, since we
only do CacheInvalidateSmgr() once not once per fork.
Simon Riggs, reviewed and somewhat revised by Tom Lane
DropRelFileNodeBuffers, DropDatabaseBuffers, FlushRelationBuffers, and
FlushDatabaseBuffers have to scan the whole shared_buffers pool because
we have no index structure that would find the target buffers any more
efficiently than that. This gets expensive with large NBuffers. We can
shave some cycles from these loops by prechecking to see if the current
buffer is interesting before we acquire the buffer header lock.
Ordinarily such a test would be unsafe, but in these cases it should be
safe because we are already assuming that the caller holds a lock that
prevents any new target pages from being loaded into the buffer pool
concurrently. Therefore, no buffer tag should be changing to a value of
interest, only away from a value of interest. So a false negative match
is impossible, while a false positive is safe because we'll recheck after
acquiring the buffer lock. Initial testing says that this speeds these
loops by a factor of 2X to 3X on common Intel hardware.
Patch for DropRelFileNodeBuffers by Jeff Janes (based on an idea of
Heikki's); extended to the remaining sequential scans by Tom Lane
Commit 6d90eaaa89a007e0d365f49d6436f35d2392cfeb added a hibernation mode
to the bgwriter to reduce the server's idle-power consumption. However,
its interaction with the detailed behavior of BgBufferSync's feedback
control loop wasn't very well thought out. That control loop depends
primarily on the rate of buffer allocation, not the rate of buffer
dirtying, so the hibernation mode has to be designed to operate only when
no new buffer allocations are happening. Also, the check for whether the
system is effectively idle was not quite right and would fail to detect
a constant low level of activity, thus allowing the bgwriter to go into
hibernation mode in a way that would let the cycle time vary quite a bit,
possibly further confusing the feedback loop. To fix, move the wakeup
support from MarkBufferDirty and SetBufferCommitInfoNeedsSave into
StrategyGetBuffer, and prevent the bgwriter from entering hibernation mode
unless no buffer allocations have happened recently.
In addition, fix the delaying logic to remove the problem of possibly not
responding to signals promptly, which was basically caused by trying to use
the process latch's is_set flag for multiple purposes. I can't prove it
but I'm suspicious that that hack was responsible for the intermittent
"postmaster does not shut down" failures we've been seeing in the buildfarm
lately. In any case it did nothing to improve the readability or
robustness of the code.
In passing, express the hibernation sleep time as a multiplier on
BgWriterDelay, not a constant. I'm not sure whether there's any value in
exposing the longer sleep time as an independently configurable setting,
but we can at least make it act like this for little extra code.
Ants Aasma's original patch to add timing information for buffer I/O
requests exposed this data at the relation level, which was judged too
costly. I've here exposed it at the database level instead.
Currently, the only way to see the numbers this gathers is via
EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS), but the plan is to add visibility through
the stats collector and pg_stat_statements in subsequent patches.
Ants Aasma, reviewed by Greg Smith, with some further changes by me.
To make it wake up promptly when activity starts again, backends nudge it
by setting a latch in MarkBufferDirty(). The latch is kept set while
bgwriter is active, so there is very little overhead from that when the
system is busy. It is only armed before going into longer sleep.
Peter Geoghegan, with some changes by me.
As noted by Heikki Linnakangas, the previous coding confused the "flags"
variable with the "mask" variable. The affect of this appears to be that
unlogged buffers would get written out at every checkpoint rather than
only at shutdown time. Although that's arguably an acceptable failure
mode, I'm back-patching this change, since it seems like a poor idea to
rely on this happening to work.
This adds some I/O stats to the logging of autovacuum (when the
operation takes long enough that log_autovacuum_min_duration causes it
to be logged), so that it is easier to tune. Notably, it adds buffer
I/O counts (hits, misses, dirtied) and read and write rate.
Authors: Greg Smith and Noah Misch
When the system is idle for awhile after activity, the "smoothed_alloc"
state variable in BgBufferSync converges slowly to zero. With standard
IEEE float arithmetic this results in several iterations with denormalized
values, which causes kernel traps and annoying log messages on some
poorly-designed platforms. There's no real need to track such small values
of smoothed_alloc, so we can prevent the kernel traps by forcing it to zero
as soon as it's too small to be interesting for our purposes. This issue
is purely cosmetic, since the iterations don't happen fast enough for the
kernel traps to pose any meaningful performance problem, but still it seems
worth shutting up the log messages.
The kernel log messages were previously reported by a number of people,
but kudos to Greg Matthews for tracking down exactly where they were coming
from.
bgwriter is now a much less important process, responsible for page
cleaning duties only. checkpointer is now responsible for checkpoints
and so has a key role in shutdown. Later patches will correct doc
references to the now old idea that bgwriter performs checkpoints.
Has beneficial effect on performance at high write rates, but mainly
refactoring to more easily allow changes for power reduction by
simplifying previously tortuous code around required to allow page
cleaning and checkpointing to time slice in the same process.
Patch by me, Review by Dickson Guedes
We need not wait until the commit record is durably on disk, because
in the event of a crash the page we're updating with hint bits will
be gone anyway. Per off-list report from Heikki Linnakangas, this
can significantly degrade the performance of unlogged tables; I was
able to show a 2x speedup from this patch on a pgbench run with scale
factor 15. In practice, this will mostly help small, heavily updated
tables, because on larger tables you're unlikely to run into the same
row again before the commit record makes it out to disk.
As per my recent proposal, this refactors things so that these typedefs and
macros are available in a header that can be included in frontend-ish code.
I also changed various headers that were undesirably including
utils/timestamp.h to include datatype/timestamp.h instead. Unsurprisingly,
this showed that half the system was getting utils/timestamp.h by way of
xlog.h.
No actual code changes here, just header refactoring.
It was initialized in the wrong place and to the wrong value. With bad
luck this could result in incorrect query-cancellation failures in hot
standby sessions, should a HS backend be holding pin on buffer number 1
while trying to acquire a lock.
"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.)
This commit fixes a bug in the previous one, which neglected to cleanly
handle the LRU ring that fd.c uses to manage open files, and caused an
unacceptable failure just before beta2 and was thus reverted.
This reverts commit 54d9e8c6c19cbefa8fb42ed3442a0a5327590ed3, which
caused a failure on the buildfarm. Not a good thing to have just before
a beta release.
"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.)
The contents of an unlogged table are WAL-logged; thus, they are not
available on standby servers and are truncated whenever the database
system enters recovery. Indexes on unlogged tables are also unlogged.
Unlogged GiST indexes are not currently supported.
This commit replaces pg_class.relistemp with pg_class.relpersistence;
and also modifies the RangeVar node type to carry relpersistence rather
than istemp. It also removes removes rd_istemp from RelationData and
instead performs the correct computation based on relpersistence.
For clarity, we add three new macros: RelationNeedsWAL(),
RelationUsesLocalBuffers(), and RelationUsesTempNamespace(), so that we
can clarify the purpose of each check that previous depended on
rd_istemp.
This is intended as infrastructure for the upcoming unlogged tables
patch, as well as for future possible work on global temporary tables.
Forcibly releasing all leftover buffer pins should be unnecessary now
that we have a robust ResourceOwner mechanism, and it significantly
increases the cost of process shutdown. Instead, in an assert-enabled
build, assert that no pins are held; in a non-assert-enabled build, do
nothing.
Since an SMgrRelation now knows whether or not the underlying relation is
temporary, there's no point in also passing that information via an
additional argument.
This allows us to reliably remove all leftover temporary relation
files on cluster startup without reference to system catalogs or WAL;
therefore, we no longer include temporary relations in XLOG_XACT_COMMIT
and XLOG_XACT_ABORT WAL records.
Since these changes require including a backend ID in each
SharedInvalSmgrMsg, the size of the SharedInvalidationMessage.id
field has been reduced from two bytes to one, and the maximum number
of connections has been reduced from INT_MAX / 4 to 2^23-1. It would
be possible to remove these restrictions by increasing the size of
SharedInvalidationMessage by 4 bytes, but right now that doesn't seem
like a good trade-off.
Review by Jaime Casanova and Tom Lane.
woken by alarm we send SIGUSR1 to all backends requesting that they
check to see if they are blocking Startup process. If so, they throw
ERROR/FATAL as for other conflict resolutions. Deadlock stop gap
removed. max_standby_delay = -1 option removed to prevent deadlock.
This patch also removes buffer-usage statistics from the track_counts
output, since this (or the global server statistics) is deemed to be a better
interface to this information.
Itagaki Takahiro, reviewed by Euler Taveira de Oliveira.
try to protect an already-existing buffer from being evicted. This was
left as an open issue when the posix_fadvise patch was committed. I'm
not sure there's any evidence to justify more work in this area, but we
should have some record about it in the source code.
temp relations; this is no more expensive than before, now that we have
pg_class.relistemp. Insert tests into bufmgr.c to prevent attempting
to fetch pages from nonlocal temp relations. This provides a low-level
defense against bugs-of-omission allowing temp pages to be loaded into shared
buffers, as in the contrib/pgstattuple problem reported by Stuart Bishop.
While at it, tweak a bunch of places to use new relcache tests (instead of
expensive probes into pg_namespace) to detect local or nonlocal temp tables.
probes --- the BUFFER_READ_DONE probe provides the same information and more
besides. Expand the LOCK_WAIT_START/DONE probe arguments so that there's
actually some chance of telling what is being waited for. Update and
clean up the documentation.
DTrace probes, so that ordinary reads can be distinguished from relation
extension operations. Move buffer_read_start probe to before the
smgrnblocks() call that's needed in the isExtend case, since really that step
should be charged as part of the time needed for the extension operation.
(This makes it slightly harder to match the read_start with the associated
read_done, since now you can't match them on blockNumber, but it should still
be possible since isExtend operations on the same relation can never be
interleaved.) Per recent discussion.
In passing, add the page identity (forkNum/blockNum) to the parameters of the
buffer_flush_start/buffer_flush_done probes, which were unaccountably lacking
the info.
make it include the time for the possible smgropen() call, but that
results in a null pointer dereference :-(.
An alternative solution would be to fetch the buffer tag instead of
looking at *reln, but I'll just put it back as it was for the moment.
BTW, this indicates that DTrace probes evaluate their arguments even
when nominally inactive. What was that about "zero cost", again?
some bufmgr probes, take out redundant and memory-leak-inducing path arguments
to smgr__md__read__done and smgr__md__write__done, fix bogus attempt to
recalculate space used in sort__done, clean up formatting in places where
I'm not sure pgindent will do a nice job by itself.
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
includes a few new ones.
- Fixed compilation errors on OS X for probes that use typedefs
- Fixed a number of probes to pass ForkNumber per the relation forks
patch
- The new probes are those that were taken out from the previous
submitted patch and required simple fixes. Will submit the other probes
that may require more discussion in a separate patch.
Robert Lor
truncations in FSM code, call FreeSpaceMapTruncateRel from smgr_redo. To
make that cleaner from modularity point of view, move the WAL-logging one
level up to RelationTruncate, and move RelationTruncate and all the
related WAL-logging to new src/backend/catalog/storage.c file. Introduce
new RelationCreateStorage and RelationDropStorage functions that are used
instead of calling smgrcreate/smgrscheduleunlink directly. Move the
pending rel deletion stuff from smgrcreate/smgrscheduleunlink to the new
functions. This leaves smgr.c as a thin wrapper around md.c; all the
transactional stuff is now in storage.c.
This will make it easier to add new forks with similar truncation logic,
like the visibility map.
