Previously, this was hardcoded: we always had 8. Performance testing
shows that isn't enough, especially on big SMP systems, so we allow it
to scale up as high as 32 when there's adequate memory. On the flip
side, when shared_buffers is very small, drop the number of CLOG buffers
down to as little as 4, so that we can start the postmaster even
when very little shared memory is available.
Per extensive discussion with Simon Riggs, Tom Lane, and others on
pgsql-hackers.
This patch eliminates the marking of subtransactions as SUBCOMMITTED in pg_clog
during their commit; instead they remain in-progress until main transaction
commit. At main transaction commit, the commit protocol is atomic-by-page
instead of one transaction at a time. To avoid a race condition with some
subtransactions appearing committed before others in the case where they span
more than one pg_clog page, we conserve the logic that marks them subcommitted
before marking the parent committed.
Simon Riggs with minor help from me
before reporting a transaction committed. Data consistency is still
guaranteed (unlike setting fsync = off), but a crash may lose the effects
of the last few transactions. Patch by Simon, some editorialization by Tom.
in PITR scenarios. We now WAL-log the replacement of old XIDs with
FrozenTransactionId, so that such replacement is guaranteed to propagate to
PITR slave databases. Also, rather than relying on hint-bit updates to be
preserved, pg_clog is not truncated until all instances of an XID are known to
have been replaced by FrozenTransactionId. Add new GUC variables and
pg_autovacuum columns to allow management of the freezing policy, so that
users can trade off the size of pg_clog against the amount of freezing work
done. Revise the already-existing code that forces autovacuum of tables
approaching the wraparound point to make it more bulletproof; also, revise the
autovacuum logic so that anti-wraparound vacuuming is done per-table rather
than per-database. initdb forced because of changes in pg_class, pg_database,
and pg_autovacuum catalogs. Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, and Tom Lane.
when an error occurs during xlog replay. Also, replace the former risky
'write into a fixed-size buffer with no overflow detection' API for XLOG
record description routines; use an expansible StringInfo instead. (The
latter accounts for most of the patch bulk.)
Qingqing Zhou
SLRU area. The number of slots is still a compile-time constant (someday
we might want to change that), but at least it's a different constant for
each SLRU area. Increase number of subtrans buffers to 32 based on
experimentation with a heavily subtrans-bashing test case, and increase
number of multixact member buffers to 16, since it's obviously silly for
it not to be at least twice the number of multixact offset buffers.
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.
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 ...
updates are no longer WAL-logged nor even fsync'd; we do not need to,
since after a crash no old pg_subtrans data is needed again. We truncate
pg_subtrans to RecentGlobalXmin at each checkpoint. slru.c's API is
refactored a little bit to separate out the necessary decisions.
performance front, but with feature freeze upon us I think it's time to
drive a stake in the ground and say that this will be in 7.5.
Alvaro Herrera, with some help from Tom Lane.
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.
buffer manager with 'pg_clog', a specialized access method modeled
on pg_xlog. This simplifies startup (don't need to play games to
open pg_log; among other things, OverrideTransactionSystem goes away),
should improve performance a little, and opens the door to recycling
commit log space by removing no-longer-needed segments of the commit
log. Actual recycling is not there yet, but I felt I should commit
this part separately since it'd still be useful if we chose not to
do transaction ID wraparound.
