ProcKill instead, where we still have a PGPROC with which to wait on
LWLocks. This fixes 'can't wait without a PROC structure' failures
occasionally seen during backend shutdown (I'm surprised they weren't
more frequent, actually). Add an Assert() to LWLockAcquire to help
catch any similar mistakes in future. Fix failure to update MyProcPid
for standalone backends and pgstat processes.
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.
portability issues). Caller-visible data structures are now allocated
on MAXALIGN boundaries, allowing safe use of datatypes wider than 'long'.
Rejigger hash_create API so that caller specifies size of key and
total size of entry, not size of key and size of rest of entry.
This simplifies life considerably since each number is just a sizeof(),
and padding issues etc. are taken care of automatically.
existing lock manager and spinlocks: it understands exclusive vs shared
lock but has few other fancy features. Replace most uses of spinlocks
with lightweight locks. All remaining uses of spinlocks have very short
lock hold times (a few dozen instructions), so tweak spinlock backoff
code to work efficiently given this assumption. All per my proposal on
pghackers 26-Sep-01.
to ensure that we have released buffer refcounts and so forth, rather than
putting ad-hoc operations before (some of the calls to) proc_exit. Add
commentary to discourage future hackers from repeating that mistake.
included by everything that includes bufmgr.h --- it's supposed to be
internals, after all, not part of the API! This fixes the conflict
against FreeBSD headers reported by Rosenman, by making it unnecessary
for s_lock.h to be included by plperl.c.
IPC key assignment will now work correctly even when multiple postmasters
are using same logical port number (which is possible given -k switch).
There is only one shared-mem segment per postmaster now, not 3.
Rip out broken code for non-TAS case in bufmgr and xlog, substitute a
complete S_LOCK emulation using semaphores in spin.c. TAS and non-TAS
logic is now exactly the same.
When deadlock is detected, "Deadlock detected" is now the elog(ERROR)
message, rather than a NOTICE that comes out before an unhelpful ERROR.
from bufmgr - it would be nice to have separate hash in smgr
for node <--> fd mappings, but for the moment it's easy to
add new hash to relcache.
Fixed small bug in xlog.c:ReadRecord.
That means you can now set your options in either or all of $PGDATA/configuration,
some postmaster option (--enable-fsync=off), or set a SET command. The list of
options is in backend/utils/misc/guc.c, documentation will be written post haste.
pg_options is gone, so is that pq_geqo config file. Also removed were backend -K,
-Q, and -T options (no longer applicable, although -d0 does the same as -Q).
Added to configure an --enable-syslog option.
changed all callers from TPRINTF to elog(DEBUG)
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.
* Buffer refcount cleanup (per my "progress report" to pghackers, 9/22).
* Add links to backend PROC structs to sinval's array of per-backend info,
and use these links for routines that need to check the state of all
backends (rather than the slow, complicated search of the ShmemIndex
hashtable that was used before). Add databaseOID to PROC structs.
* Use this to implement an interlock that prevents DESTROY DATABASE of
a database containing running backends. (It's a little tricky to prevent
a concurrently-starting backend from getting in there, since the new
backend is not able to lock anything at the time it tries to look up
its database in pg_database. My solution is to recheck that the DB is
OK at the end of InitPostgres. It may not be a 100% solution, but it's
a lot better than no interlock at all...)
* In ALTER TABLE RENAME, flush buffers for the relation before doing the
rename of the physical files, to ensure we don't get failures later from
mdblindwrt().
* Update TRUNCATE patch so that it actually compiles against current
sources :-(.
You should do "make clean all" after pulling these changes.
shared memory space allocation. It's a wonder we have not seen bug
reports traceable to this area ... it's quite clear that the routine
dir_realloc() has never worked correctly, for example.
Reply-To: hackers@hub.org, Dan McGuirk <mcguirk@indirect.com>
To: hackers@hub.org
Subject: [HACKERS] tmin writeback optimization
I was doing some profiling of the backend, and noticed that during a certain
benchmark I was running somewhere between 30% and 75% of the backend's CPU
time was being spent in calls to TransactionIdDidCommit() from
HeapTupleSatisfiesNow() or HeapTupleSatisfiesItself() to determine that
changed rows' transactions had in fact been committed even though the rows'
tmin values had not yet been set.
When a query looks at a given row, it needs to figure out whether the
transaction that changed the row has been committed and hence it should pay
attention to the row, or whether on the other hand the transaction is still
in progress or has been aborted and hence the row should be ignored. If
a tmin value is set, it is known definitively that the row's transaction
has been committed. However, if tmin is not set, the transaction
referred to in xmin must be looked up in pg_log, and this is what the
backend was spending a lot of time doing during my benchmark.
So, implementing a method suggested by Vadim, I created the following
patch that, the first time a query finds a committed row whose tmin value
is not set, sets it, and marks the buffer where the row is stored as
dirty. (It works for tmax, too.) This doesn't result in the boost in
real time performance I was hoping for, however it does decrease backend
CPU usage by up to two-thirds in certain situations, so it could be
rather beneficial in high-concurrency settings.