Even though the main benefit of the Lehman and Yao algorithm for
btrees is that no locks need be held between page reads in an
index search, we were holding a buffer pin on each leaf page after
it was read until we were ready to read the next one. The reason
was so that we could treat this as a weak lock to create an
"interlock" with vacuum's deletion of heap line pointers, even
though our README file pointed out that this was not necessary for
a scan using an MVCC snapshot.
The main goal of this patch is to reduce the blocking of vacuum
processes by in-progress btree index scans (including a cursor
which is idle), but the code rearrangement also allows for one
less buffer content lock to be taken when a forward scan steps from
one page to the next, which results in a small but consistent
performance improvement in many workloads.
This patch leaves behavior unchanged for some cases, which can be
addressed separately so that each case can be evaluated on its own
merits. These unchanged cases are when a scan uses a non-MVCC
snapshot, an index-only scan, and a scan of a btree index for which
modifications are not WAL-logged. If later patches allow all of
these cases to drop the buffer pin after reading a leaf page, then
the btree vacuum process can be simplified; it will no longer need
the "super-exclusive" lock to delete tuples from a page.
Reviewed by Heikki Linnakangas and Kyotaro Horiguchi
dsm_control->nitems never decreases, so this is testing whether the
server has *ever* run out of DSM segments, not whether it is
*currently* out of DSM segments.
Reported off-list by Amit Kapila.
Right now, there's only one flag, DSM_CREATE_NULL_IF_MAXSEGMENTS,
which suppresses the error that would normally be thrown when the
maximum number of segments already exists, instead returning NULL.
It might be useful to add more flags in the future, such as one to
ignore allocation errors, but I haven't done that here.
When LockBufferForCleanup() has to wait for getting a cleanup lock on a
buffer it does so by setting a flag in the buffer header and then wait
for other backends to signal it using ProcWaitForSignal().
Unfortunately LockBufferForCleanup() missed that ProcWaitForSignal() can
return for other reasons than the signal it is hoping for. If such a
spurious signal arrives the wait flags on the buffer header will still
be set. That then triggers "ERROR: multiple backends attempting to wait
for pincount 1".
The fix is simple, unset the flag if still set when retrying. That
implies an additional spinlock acquisition/release, but that's unlikely
to matter given the cost of waiting for a cleanup lock. Alternatively
it'd have been possible to move responsibility for maintaining the
relevant flag to the waiter all together, but that might have had
negative consequences due to possible floods of signals. Besides being
more invasive.
This looks to be a very longstanding bug. The relevant code in
LockBufferForCleanup() hasn't changed materially since its introduction
and ProcWaitForSignal() was documented to return for unrelated reasons
since 8.2. The master only patch series removing ImmediateInterruptOK
made it much easier to hit though, as ProcSendSignal/ProcWaitForSignal
now uses a latch shared with other tasks.
Per discussion with Kevin Grittner, Tom Lane and me.
Backpatch to all supported branches.
Discussion: 11553.1423805224@sss.pgh.pa.us
The remaining caller (lwlocks) doesn't need that facility, and we plan
to remove ImmedidateInterruptOK entirely. That means that interrupts
can't be serviced race-free and portably anyway, so there's little
reason for keeping the feature.
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas
Deadlock checking was performed inside signal handlers up to
now. While it's a remarkable feat to have made this work reliably,
it's quite complex to understand why that is the case. Partially it
worked due to the assumption that semaphores are signal safe - which
is not actually documented to be the case for sysv semaphores.
The reason we had to rely on performing this work inside signal
handlers is that semaphores aren't guaranteed to be interruptable by
signals on all platforms. But now that latches provide a somewhat
similar API, which actually has the guarantee of being interruptible,
we can avoid doing so.
Signalling between ProcSleep, ProcWakeup, ProcWaitForSignal and
ProcSendSignal is now done using latches. This increases the
likelihood of spurious wakeups. As spurious wakeup already were
possible and aren't likely to be frequent enough to be an actual
problem, this seems acceptable.
This change would allow for further simplification of the deadlock
checking, now that it doesn't have to run in a signal handler. But
even if I were motivated to do so right now, it would still be better
to do that separately. Such a cleanup shouldn't have to be reviewed a
the same time as the more fundamental changes in this commit.
There is one possible usability regression due to this commit. Namely
it is more likely than before that log_lock_waits messages are output
more than once.
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas
Up to now large swathes of backend code ran inside signal handlers
while reading commands from the client, to allow for speedy reaction to
asynchronous events. Most prominently shared invalidation and NOTIFY
handling. That means that complex code like the starting/stopping of
transactions is run in signal handlers... The required code was
fragile and verbose, and is likely to contain bugs.
That approach also severely limited what could be done while
communicating with the client. As the read might be from within
openssl it wasn't safely possible to trigger an error, e.g. to cancel
a backend in idle-in-transaction state. We did that in some cases,
namely fatal errors, nonetheless.
Now that FE/BE communication in the backend employs non-blocking
sockets and latches to block, we can quite simply interrupt reads from
signal handlers by setting the latch. That allows us to signal an
interrupted read, which is supposed to be retried after returning from
within the ssl library.
As signal handlers now only need to set the latch to guarantee timely
interrupt processing, remove a fair amount of complicated & fragile
code from async.c and sinval.c.
We could now actually start to process some kinds of interrupts, like
sinval ones, more often that before, but that seems better done
separately.
This work will hopefully allow to handle cases like being blocked by
sending data, interrupting idle transactions and similar to be
implemented without too much effort. In addition to allowing getting
rid of ImmediateInterruptOK, that is.
Author: Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas
The logic to compact away removed tuples from page was duplicated with
small differences in PageRepairFragmentation, PageIndexMultiDelete, and
PageIndexDeleteNoCompact. Put it into a common function.
Reviewed by Peter Geoghegan.
If any error occurred while we were in the middle of reading a protocol
message from the client, we could lose sync, and incorrectly try to
interpret a part of another message as a new protocol message. That will
usually lead to an "invalid frontend message" error that terminates the
connection. However, this is a security issue because an attacker might
be able to deliberately cause an error, inject a Query message in what's
supposed to be just user data, and have the server execute it.
We were quite careful to not have CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() calls or other
operations that could ereport(ERROR) in the middle of processing a message,
but a query cancel interrupt or statement timeout could nevertheless cause
it to happen. Also, the V2 fastpath and COPY handling were not so careful.
It's very difficult to recover in the V2 COPY protocol, so we will just
terminate the connection on error. In practice, that's what happened
previously anyway, as we lost protocol sync.
To fix, add a new variable in pqcomm.c, PqCommReadingMsg, that is set
whenever we're in the middle of reading a message. When it's set, we cannot
safely ERROR out and continue running, because we might've read only part
of a message. PqCommReadingMsg acts somewhat similarly to critical sections
in that if an error occurs while it's set, the error handler will force the
connection to be terminated, as if the error was FATAL. It's not
implemented by promoting ERROR to FATAL in elog.c, like ERROR is promoted
to PANIC in critical sections, because we want to be able to use
PG_TRY/CATCH to recover and regain protocol sync. pq_getmessage() takes
advantage of that to prevent an OOM error from terminating the connection.
To prevent unnecessary connection terminations, add a holdoff mechanism
similar to HOLD/RESUME_INTERRUPTS() that can be used hold off query cancel
interrupts, but still allow die interrupts. The rules on which interrupts
are processed when are now a bit more complicated, so refactor
ProcessInterrupts() and the calls to it in signal handlers so that the
signal handlers always call it if ImmediateInterruptOK is set, and
ProcessInterrupts() can decide to not do anything if the other conditions
are not met.
Reported by Emil Lenngren. Patch reviewed by Noah Misch and Andres Freund.
Backpatch to all supported versions.
Security: CVE-2015-0244
GetLockConflicts() has for a long time not properly terminated the
returned array. During normal processing the returned array is zero
initialized which, while not pretty, is sufficient to be recognized as
a invalid virtual transaction id. But the HotStandby case is more than
aesthetically broken: The allocated (and reused) array is neither
zeroed upon allocation, nor reinitialized, nor terminated.
Not having a terminating element means that the end of the array will
not be recognized and that recovery conflict handling will thus read
ahead into adjacent memory. Only terminating when hitting memory
content that looks like a invalid virtual transaction id. Luckily
this seems so far not have caused significant problems, besides making
recovery conflict more expensive.
Discussion: 20150127142713.GD29457@awork2.anarazel.de
Backpatch into all supported branches.
Benchmarks has shown that aligning the buffer descriptor array to
cache lines is important for scalability; especially on bigger,
multi-socket, machines.
Currently the array sometimes already happens to be aligned by
happenstance, depending how large previous shared memory allocations
were. That can lead to wildly varying performance results after minor
configuration changes.
In addition to aligning the start of descriptor array, also force the
size of individual descriptors to be of a common cache line size (64
bytes). That happens to already be the case on 64bit platforms, but
this way we can change the struct BufferDesc more easily.
As the alignment primarily matters in highly concurrent workloads
which probably all are 64bit these days, and the space wastage of
element alignment would be a bit more noticeable on 32bit systems, we
don't force the stride to be cacheline sized on 32bit platforms for
now. If somebody does actual performance testing, we can reevaluate
that decision by changing the definition of BUFFERDESC_PADDED_SIZE.
Discussion: 20140202151319.GD32123@awork2.anarazel.de
Per discussion with Bruce Momjan, Tom Lane, Robert Haas, and Peter
Geoghegan.
As noted by Tom Lane the improvements in 4b4b680c3d had the problem
that in some situations we searched, entered and modified entries in
the private refcount hash while holding a spinlock. I had tried to
keep the logic entirely local to PinBuffer_Locked(), but that's not
really possible given it's called with a spinlock held...
Besides being disadvantageous from a performance point of view, this
also has problems with error handling safety. If we failed inserting
an entry into the hashtable due to an out of memory error, we'd error
out with a held spinlock. Not good.
Change the way private refcounts are manipulated: Before a buffer can
be tracked an entry has to be reserved using
ReservePrivateRefCountEntry(); then, if a entry is not found using
GetPrivateRefCountEntry(), it can be entered with
NewPrivateRefCountEntry().
Also take advantage of the fact that PinBuffer_Locked() currently is
never called for buffers that already have been pinned by the current
backend and don't search the private refcount entries for preexisting
local pins. That results in a small, but measurable, performance
improvement.
Additionally make ReleaseBuffer() always call UnpinBuffer() for shared
buffers. That avoids duplicating work in an eventual UnpinBuffer()
call that already has been done in ReleaseBuffer() and also saves some
code.
Per discussion with Tom Lane.
Discussion: 15028.1418772313@sss.pgh.pa.us
To do so, move InitializeLatchSupport() into the new common process
initialization functions, and add a new global variable MyLatch.
MyLatch is usable as soon InitPostmasterChild() has been called
(i.e. very early during startup). Initially it points to a process
local latch that exists in all processes. InitProcess/InitAuxiliaryProcess
then replaces that local latch with PGPROC->procLatch. During shutdown
the reverse happens.
This is primarily advantageous for two reasons: For one it simplifies
dealing with the shared process latch, especially in signal handlers,
because instead of having to check for MyProc, MyLatch can be used
unconditionally. For another, a later patch that makes FEs/BE
communication use latches, now can rely on the existence of a latch,
even before having gone through InitProcess.
Discussion: 20140927191243.GD5423@alap3.anarazel.de
Since their introduction latches have required barriers in SetLatch
and ResetLatch - but when they were introduced there wasn't any
barrier abstraction. Instead latches were documented to rely on the
callsites to provide barrier semantics.
Now that the barrier support looks halfway complete, add the necessary
barriers to both latch implementations.
Also remove a now superflous lock acquisition from syncrep.c and a
superflous (and insufficient) barrier from freelist.c. There might be
other cases that can now be simplified, but those are the only ones
I've seen on a quick scan.
We might want to backpatch this at some later point, but right now the
barrier infrastructure in the backbranches isn't totally on par with
master.
Discussion: 20150112154026.GB2092@awork2.anarazel.de
Back in ed0b409, PGPROC was split and moved to static variables in
procarray.c, with procs in ProcArrayStruct replaced by an array of
integers representing process numbers (pgprocnos), with -1 indicating a
dead process which has yet to be removed. Access to procArray is
generally done under ProcArrayLock and therefore most code does not have
to concern itself with -1 entries.
However, MinimumActiveBackends intentionally does not take
ProcArrayLock, which means it has to be extra careful when accessing
procArray. Prior to ed0b409, this was handled by checking for a NULL
in the pointer array, but that check was no longer valid after the
split. Coverity pointed out that the check could never happen and so
it was removed in 5592eba. That didn't make anything worse, but it
didn't fix the issue either.
The correct fix is to check for pgprocno == -1 and skip over that entry
if it is encountered.
Back-patch to 9.2, since there can be attempts to access the arrays
prior to their start otherwise. Note that the changes prior to 9.4 will
look a bit different due to the change in 5592eba.
Note that MinimumActiveBackends only returns a bool for heuristic
purposes and any pre-array accesses are strictly read-only and so there
is no security implication and the lack of fields complaints indicates
it's very unlikely to run into issues due to this.
Pointed out by Noah.
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
The old LWLock implementation had the problem that concurrent lock
acquisitions required exclusively acquiring a spinlock. Often that
could lead to acquirers waiting behind the spinlock, even if the
actual LWLock was free.
The new implementation doesn't acquire the spinlock when acquiring the
lock itself. Instead the new atomic operations are used to atomically
manipulate the state. Only the waitqueue, used solely in the slow
path, is still protected by the spinlock. Check lwlock.c's header for
an explanation about the used algorithm.
For some common workloads on larger machines this can yield
significant performance improvements. Particularly in read mostly
workloads.
Reviewed-By: Amit Kapila and Robert Haas
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: 20130926225545.GB26663@awork2.anarazel.de
Besides being shorter and much easier to read it changes the logic in
LWLockRelease() to release all shared lockers when waking up any. This
can yield some significant performance improvements - and the fairness
isn't really much worse than before, as we always allowed new shared
lockers to jump the queue.
In LWLockRelease() (and in 9.4+ LWLockUpdateVar()) we release enqueued
waiters using PGSemaphoreUnlock(). As there are other sources of such
unlocks backends only wake up if MyProc->lwWaiting is set to false;
which is only done in the aforementioned functions.
Before this commit there were dangers because the store to lwWaitLink
could become visible before the store to lwWaitLink. This could both
happen due to compiler reordering (on most compilers) and on some
platforms due to the CPU reordering stores.
The possible consequence of this is that a backend stops waiting
before lwWaitLink is set to NULL. If that backend then tries to
acquire another lock and has to wait there the list could become
corrupted once the lwWaitLink store is finally performed.
Add a write memory barrier to prevent that issue.
Unfortunately the barrier support has been only added in 9.2. Given
that the issue has not knowingly been observed in praxis it seems
sufficient to prohibit compiler reordering using volatile for 9.0 and
9.1. Actual problems due to compiler reordering are more likely
anyway.
Discussion: 20140210134625.GA15246@awork2.anarazel.de
Previously, if you wanted anything besides C-string hash keys, you had to
specify a custom hashing function to hash_create(). Nearly all such
callers were specifying tag_hash or oid_hash; which is tedious, and rather
error-prone, since a caller could easily miss the opportunity to optimize
by using hash_uint32 when appropriate. Replace this with a design whereby
callers using simple binary-data keys just specify HASH_BLOBS and don't
need to mess with specific support functions. hash_create() itself will
take care of optimizing when the key size is four bytes.
This nets out saving a few hundred bytes of code space, and offers
a measurable performance improvement in tidbitmap.c (which was not
exploiting the opportunity to use hash_uint32 for its 4-byte keys).
There might be some wins elsewhere too, I didn't analyze closely.
In future we could look into offering a similar optimized hashing function
for 8-byte keys. Under this design that could be done in a centralized
and machine-independent fashion, whereas getting it right for keys of
platform-dependent sizes would've been notationally painful before.
For the moment, the old way still works fine, so as not to break source
code compatibility for loadable modules. Eventually we might want to
remove tag_hash and friends from the exported API altogether, since there's
no real need for them to be explicitly referenced from outside dynahash.c.
Teodor Sigaev and Tom Lane
Transactions can now set their commit timestamp directly as they commit,
or an external transaction commit timestamp can be fed from an outside
system using the new function TransactionTreeSetCommitTsData(). This
data is crash-safe, and truncated at Xid freeze point, same as pg_clog.
This module is disabled by default because it causes a performance hit,
but can be enabled in postgresql.conf requiring only a server restart.
A new test in src/test/modules is included.
Catalog version bumped due to the new subdirectory within PGDATA and a
couple of new SQL functions.
Authors: Álvaro Herrera and Petr Jelínek
Reviewed to varying degrees by Michael Paquier, Andres Freund, Robert
Haas, Amit Kapila, Fujii Masao, Jaime Casanova, Simon Riggs, Steven
Singer, Peter Eisentraut
Each WAL record now carries information about the modified relation and
block(s) in a standardized format. That makes it easier to write tools that
need that information, like pg_rewind, prefetching the blocks to speed up
recovery, etc.
There's a whole new API for building WAL records, replacing the XLogRecData
chains used previously. The new API consists of XLogRegister* functions,
which are called for each buffer and chunk of data that is added to the
record. The new API also gives more control over when a full-page image is
written, by passing flags to the XLogRegisterBuffer function.
This also simplifies the XLogReadBufferForRedo() calls. The function can dig
the relation and block number from the WAL record, so they no longer need to
be passed as arguments.
For the convenience of redo routines, XLogReader now disects each WAL record
after reading it, copying the main data part and the per-block data into
MAXALIGNed buffers. The data chunks are not aligned within the WAL record,
but the redo routines can assume that the pointers returned by XLogRecGet*
functions are. Redo routines are now passed the XLogReaderState, which
contains the record in the already-disected format, instead of the plain
XLogRecord.
The new record format also makes the fixed size XLogRecord header smaller,
by removing the xl_len field. The length of the "main data" portion is now
stored at the end of the WAL record, and there's a separate header after
XLogRecord for it. The alignment padding at the end of XLogRecord is also
removed. This compansates for the fact that the new format would otherwise
be more bulky than the old format.
Reviewed by Andres Freund, Amit Kapila, Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera,
Fujii Masao.
Unlogged relations are only reset when performing a unclean
restart. That means they have to be synced to disk during clean
shutdowns. During normal processing that's achieved by registering a
buffer's file to be fsynced at the next checkpoint when flushed. But
ResetUnloggedRelations() doesn't go through the buffer manager, so
nothing will force reset relations to disk before the next shutdown
checkpoint.
So just make ResetUnloggedRelations() fsync the newly created main
forks to disk.
Discussion: 20140912112246.GA4984@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch to 9.1 where unlogged tables were introduced.
Abhijit Menon-Sen and Andres Freund
There was a window in RestoreBackupBlock where a page would be zeroed out,
but not yet locked. If a backend pinned and locked the page in that window,
it saw the zeroed page instead of the old page or new page contents, which
could lead to missing rows in a result set, or errors.
To fix, replace RBM_ZERO with RBM_ZERO_AND_LOCK, which atomically pins,
zeroes, and locks the page, if it's not in the buffer cache already.
In stable branches, the old RBM_ZERO constant is renamed to RBM_DO_NOT_USE,
to avoid breaking any 3rd party extensions that might use RBM_ZERO. More
importantly, this avoids renumbering the other enum values, which would
cause even bigger confusion in extensions that use ReadBufferExtended, but
haven't been recompiled.
Backpatch to all supported versions; this has been racy since hot standby
was introduced.
BRIN is a new index access method intended to accelerate scans of very
large tables, without the maintenance overhead of btrees or other
traditional indexes. They work by maintaining "summary" data about
block ranges. Bitmap index scans work by reading each summary tuple and
comparing them with the query quals; all pages in the range are returned
in a lossy TID bitmap if the quals are consistent with the values in the
summary tuple, otherwise not. Normal index scans are not supported
because these indexes do not store TIDs.
As new tuples are added into the index, the summary information is
updated (if the block range in which the tuple is added is already
summarized) or not; in the latter case, a subsequent pass of VACUUM or
the brin_summarize_new_values() function will create the summary
information.
For data types with natural 1-D sort orders, the summary info consists
of the maximum and the minimum values of each indexed column within each
page range. This type of operator class we call "Minmax", and we
supply a bunch of them for most data types with B-tree opclasses.
Since the BRIN code is generalized, other approaches are possible for
things such as arrays, geometric types, ranges, etc; even for things
such as enum types we could do something different than minmax with
better results. In this commit I only include minmax.
Catalog version bumped due to new builtin catalog entries.
There's more that could be done here, but this is a good step forwards.
Loosely based on ideas from Simon Riggs; code mostly by Álvaro Herrera,
with contribution by Heikki Linnakangas.
Patch reviewed by: Amit Kapila, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas.
Testing help from Jeff Janes, Erik Rijkers, Emanuel Calvo.
PS:
The research leading to these results has received funding from the
European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under
grant agreement n° 318633.
xlog.c is huge, this makes it a little bit smaller, which is nice. Functions
related to putting together the WAL record are in xloginsert.c, and the
lower level stuff for managing WAL buffers and such are in xlog.c.
Also move the definition of XLogRecord to a separate header file. This
causes churn in the #includes of all the files that write WAL records, and
redo routines, but it avoids pulling in xlog.h into most places.
Reviewed by Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera, Andres Freund and Amit Kapila.
This reassociates a dynamic shared memory handle previous passed to
dsm_pin_mapping with the current resource owner, so that it will be
cleaned up at the end of the current query.
Patch by me. Review of the function name by Andres Freund, Amit
Kapila, Jim Nasby, Petr Jelinek, and Álvaro Herrera.
Nobody seemed concerned about this naming when it originally went in,
but there's a pending patch that implements the opposite of
dsm_keep_mapping, and the term "unkeep" was judged unpalatable.
"unpin" has existing precedent in the PostgreSQL code base, and the
English language, so use this terminology instead.
Per discussion, back-patch to 9.4.
CREATE DATABASE and ALTER DATABASE .. SET TABLESPACE copy the source
database directory on the filesystem level. To ensure the on disk
state is consistent they block out users of the affected database and
force a checkpoint to flush out all data to disk. Unfortunately, up to
now, that checkpoint didn't flush out dirty buffers from unlogged
relations.
That bug means there could be leftover dirty buffers in either the
template database, or the database in its old location. Leading to
problems when accessing relations in an inconsistent state; and to
possible problems during shutdown in the SET TABLESPACE case because
buffers belonging files that don't exist anymore are flushed.
This was reported in bug #10675 by Maxim Boguk.
Fix by Pavan Deolasee, modified somewhat by me. Reviewed by MauMau and
Fujii Masao.
Backpatch to 9.1 where unlogged tables were introduced.
LWLockRelease should release all backends waiting with LWLockWaitForVar,
even when another backend has already been woken up to acquire the lock,
i.e. when releaseOK is false. LWLockWaitForVar can return as soon as the
protected value changes, even if the other backend will acquire the lock.
Fix that by resetting releaseOK to true in LWLockWaitForVar, whenever
adding itself to the wait queue.
This should fix the bug reported by MauMau, where the system occasionally
hangs when there is a lot of concurrent WAL activity and a checkpoint.
Backpatch to 9.4, where this code was added.
shm_mq_sendv sends a message to the queue assembled from multiple
locations. This is expected to be used by forthcoming patches to
allow frontend/backend protocol messages to be sent via shm_mq, but
might be useful for other purposes as well.
shm_mq_set_handle associates a BackgroundWorkerHandle with an
already-existing shm_mq_handle. This solves a timing problem when
creating a shm_mq to communicate with a newly-launched background
worker: if you attach to the queue first, and the background worker
fails to start, you might block forever trying to do I/O on the queue;
but if you start the background worker first, but then die before
attaching to the queue, the background worrker might block forever
trying to do I/O on the queue. This lets you attach before starting
the worker (so that the worker is protected) and then associate the
BackgroundWorkerHandle later (so that you are also protected).
Patch by me, reviewed by Stephen Frost.
Testing by Amit Kapila, Andres Freund, and myself, with and without
other patches that also aim to improve scalability, seems to indicate
that this change is a significant win over the current value and over
smaller values such as 64. It's not clear how high we can push this
value before it starts to have negative side-effects elsewhere, but
going this far looks OK.
Several upcoming performance/scalability improvements require atomic
operations. This new API avoids the need to splatter compiler and
architecture dependent code over all the locations employing atomic
ops.
For several of the potential usages it'd be problematic to maintain
both, a atomics using implementation and one using spinlocks or
similar. In all likelihood one of the implementations would not get
tested regularly under concurrency. To avoid that scenario the new API
provides a automatic fallback of atomic operations to spinlocks. All
properties of atomic operations are maintained. This fallback -
obviously - isn't as fast as just using atomic ops, but it's not bad
either. For one of the future users the atomics ontop spinlocks
implementation was actually slightly faster than the old purely
spinlock using implementation. That's important because it reduces the
fear of regressing older platforms when improving the scalability for
new ones.
The API, loosely modeled after the C11 atomics support, currently
provides 'atomic flags' and 32 bit unsigned integers. If the platform
efficiently supports atomic 64 bit unsigned integers those are also
provided.
To implement atomics support for a platform/architecture/compiler for
a type of atomics 32bit compare and exchange needs to be
implemented. If available and more efficient native support for flags,
32 bit atomic addition, and corresponding 64 bit operations may also
be provided. Additional useful atomic operations are implemented
generically ontop of these.
The implementation for various versions of gcc, msvc and sun studio have
been tested. Additional existing stub implementations for
* Intel icc
* HUPX acc
* IBM xlc
are included but have never been tested. These will likely require
fixes based on buildfarm and user feedback.
As atomic operations also require barriers for some operations the
existing barrier support has been moved into the atomics code.
Author: Andres Freund with contributions from Oskari Saarenmaa
Reviewed-By: Amit Kapila, Robert Haas, Heikki Linnakangas and Álvaro Herrera
Discussion: CA+TgmoYBW+ux5-8Ja=Mcyuy8=VXAnVRHp3Kess6Pn3DMXAPAEA@mail.gmail.com,
20131015123303.GH5300@awork2.anarazel.de,
20131028205522.GI20248@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.
Now that spinlocks (hopefully!) act as compiler barriers, as of commit
0709b7ee72, this should be safe. This
serves as a demonstration of the new coding style, and may be optimized
better on some machines as well.
Previously, they functioned as barriers against CPU reordering but not
compiler reordering, an odd API that required extensive use of volatile
everywhere that spinlocks are used. That's error-prone and has negative
implications for performance, so change it.
In theory, this makes it safe to remove many of the uses of volatile
that we currently have in our code base, but we may find that there are
some bugs in this effort when we do. In the long run, though, this
should make for much more maintainable code.
Patch by me. Review by Andres Freund.
