StrategyGetBuffer() has proven to be a bottleneck in a number of
buffer acquisition heavy workloads. To some degree this has already
been alleviated by 5d7962c6, but it still can be quite a heavy
bottleneck. The problem is that in unfortunate usage patterns a
single StrategyGetBuffer() call will have to look at a large number of
buffers - in turn making it likely that the process will be put to
sleep while still holding the spinlock.
Replace most of the usage of the buffer_strategy_lock spinlock for the
clock sweep by a atomic nextVictimBuffer variable. That variable,
modulo NBuffers, is the current hand of the clock sweep. The buffer
clock-sweep then only needs to acquire the spinlock after a
wraparound. And even then only in the process that did the wrapping
around. That alleviates nearly all the contention on the relevant
spinlock, although significant contention on the cacheline can still
exist.
Reviewed-By: Robert Haas and Amit Kapila
Discussion: 20141010160020.GG6670@alap3.anarazel.de,
20141027133218.GA2639@awork2.anarazel.de
Previously, we used an lwlock that was held from the time we began
seeking a candidate buffer until the time when we found and pinned
one, which is disastrous for concurrency. Instead, use a spinlock
which is held just long enough to pop the freelist or advance the
clock sweep hand, and then released. If we need to advance the clock
sweep further, we reacquire the spinlock once per buffer.
This represents a significant increase in atomic operations around
buffer eviction, but it still wins on many workloads. On others, it
may result in no gain, or even cause a regression, unless the number
of buffer mapping locks is also increased. However, that seems like
material for a separate commit. We may also need to consider other
methods of mitigating contention on this spinlock, such as splitting
it into multiple locks or jumping the clock sweep hand more than one
buffer at a time, but those, too, seem like separate improvements.
Patch by me, inspired by a much larger patch from Amit Kapila.
Reviewed by Andres Freund.
This makes it possible to store lwlocks as part of some other data
structure in the main shared memory segment, or in a dynamic shared
memory segment. There is still a main LWLock array and this patch does
not move anything out of it, but it provides necessary infrastructure
for doing that in the future.
This change is likely to increase the size of LWLockPadded on some
platforms, especially 32-bit platforms where it was previously only
16 bytes.
Patch by me. Review by Andres Freund and KaiGai Kohei.
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
Commit 6d90eaaa89 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.
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 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.
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
of multiple forks, and each fork can be created and grown separately.
The bulk of this patch is about changing the smgr API to include an extra
ForkNumber argument in every smgr function. Also, smgrscheduleunlink and
smgrdounlink no longer implicitly call smgrclose, because other forks might
still exist after unlinking one. The callers of those functions have been
modified to call smgrclose instead.
This patch in itself doesn't have any user-visible effect, but provides the
infrastructure needed for upcoming patches. The additional forks envisioned
are a rewritten FSM implementation that doesn't rely on a fixed-size shared
memory block, and a visibility map to allow skipping portions of a table in
VACUUM that have no dead tuples.
corresponding struct definitions. This allows other headers to avoid including
certain highly-loaded headers such as rel.h and relscan.h, instead using just
relcache.h, heapam.h or genam.h, which are more lightweight and thus cause less
unnecessary dependencies.
forks. XLogOpenRelation() and the associated light-weight relation cache in
xlogutils.c is gone, and XLogReadBuffer() now takes a RelFileNode as argument,
instead of Relation.
For functions that still need a Relation struct during WAL replay, there's a
new function called CreateFakeRelcacheEntry() that returns a fake entry like
XLogOpenRelation() used to.
buffers that cannot possibly need to be cleaned, and estimates how many
buffers it should try to clean based on moving averages of recent allocation
requests and density of reusable buffers. The patch also adds a couple
more columns to pg_stat_bgwriter to help measure the effectiveness of the
bgwriter.
Greg Smith, building on his own work and ideas from several other people,
in particular a much older patch from Itagaki Takahiro.
over a fairly long period of time, rather than being spat out in a burst.
This happens only for background checkpoints carried out by the bgwriter;
other cases, such as a shutdown checkpoint, are still done at full speed.
Remove the "all buffers" scan in the bgwriter, and associated stats
infrastructure, since this seems no longer very useful when the checkpoint
itself is properly throttled.
Original patch by Itagaki Takahiro, reworked by Heikki Linnakangas,
and some minor API editorialization by me.
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.
misleadingly-named WriteBuffer routine, and instead require routines that
change buffer pages to call MarkBufferDirty (which does exactly what it says).
We also require that they do so before calling XLogInsert; this takes care of
the synchronization requirement documented in SyncOneBuffer. Note that
because bufmgr takes the buffer content lock (in shared mode) while writing
out any buffer, it doesn't matter whether MarkBufferDirty is executed before
the buffer content change is complete, so long as the content change is
completed before releasing exclusive lock on the buffer. So it's OK to set
the dirtybit before we fill in the LSN.
This eliminates the former kluge of needing to set the dirtybit in LockBuffer.
Aside from making the code more transparent, we can also add some new
debugging assertions, in particular that the caller of MarkBufferDirty must
hold the buffer content lock, not merely a pin.
in favor of having just one set of macros that don't do HOLD/RESUME_INTERRUPTS
(hence, these correspond to the old SpinLockAcquire_NoHoldoff case).
Given our coding rules for spinlock use, there is no reason to allow
CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS to be done while holding a spinlock, and also there
is no situation where ImmediateInterruptOK will be true while holding a
spinlock. Therefore doing HOLD/RESUME_INTERRUPTS while taking/releasing a
spinlock is just a waste of cycles. Qingqing Zhou and Tom Lane.
comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory. Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).
Backpatch to 8.1.X.
that was added to localbuf.c in 8.1; therefore, applying it to a temp table
left corrupt lookup state in memory. The only case where this had a
significant chance of causing problems was an ON COMMIT DELETE ROWS temp
table; the other possible paths left bogus state that was unlikely to
be used again. Per report from Csaba Nagy.
pointers, to ensure that compilers won't rearrange accesses to occur
while we're not holding the buffer header spinlock. It's probably
not necessary to mark volatile in every single place in bufmgr.c,
but better safe than sorry. Per trouble report from Kevin Grittner.
to 'Size' (that is, size_t), and install overflow detection checks in it.
This allows us to remove the former arbitrary restrictions on NBuffers
etc. It won't make any difference in a 32-bit machine, but in a 64-bit
machine you could theoretically have terabytes of shared buffers.
(How efficiently we could manage 'em remains to be seen.) Similarly,
num_temp_buffers, work_mem, and maintenance_work_mem can be set above
2Gb on a 64-bit machine. Original patch from Koichi Suzuki, additional
work by moi.
communication structure, and make it its own module with its own lock.
This should reduce contention at least a little, and it definitely makes
the code seem cleaner. Per my recent proposal.
the freelist, plus per-buffer spinlocks that protect access to individual
shared buffer headers. This requires abandoning a global freelist (since
the freelist is a global contention point), which shoots down ARC and 2Q
as well as plain LRU management. Adopt a clock sweep algorithm instead.
Preliminary results show substantial improvement in multi-backend situations.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
(if any) currently waited for by LockBufferForCleanup(), which is all
that we were using it for anymore. Saves some space and eliminates
proportional-to-NBuffers slowdown in UnlockBuffers().
There are various things left to do: contrib dbsize and oid2name modules
need work, and so does the documentation. Also someone should think about
COMMENT ON TABLESPACE and maybe RENAME TABLESPACE. Also initlocation is
dead, it just doesn't know it yet.
Gavin Sherry and Tom Lane.
of whether we have successfully read data into a buffer; this makes the
error behavior a bit more transparent (IMHO anyway), and also makes it
work correctly for local buffers which don't use Start/TerminateBufferIO.
Collapse three separate functions for writing a shared buffer into one.
This overlaps a bit with cleanups that Neil proposed awhile back, but
seems not to have committed yet.
of VACUUM cases so that VACUUM requests don't affect the ARC state at all,
avoid corner case where BufferSync would uselessly rewrite a buffer that
no longer contains the page that was to be flushed. Make some minor
other cleanups in and around the bufmgr as well, such as moving PinBuffer
and UnpinBuffer into bufmgr.c where they really belong.
