Re: PrivateRefCount patch has got issues

Hi,

Sorry for taking long to get back to this...

On 2014-12-21 13:21:56 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> The idea I'd been wondering about hinged on the same observation that we
> know the buffer is not pinned (by our process) already, but the mechanics
> would be closer to what we do in resource managers: reserve space first,
> do the thing that needs to be remembered, bump the count using the
> reserved space.  Given the way you've set this up, the idea boils down to
> having a precheck call that forces there to be an empty slot in the local
> fastpath array (by pushing something out to the hash table if necessary)
> before we start trying to pin the buffer.  Then it's guaranteed that the
> "record" step will succeed.

After pondering the problem for a while I agree that this is the best
approach. I've implemented it and it imo actually looks cleaner than
before because GetPrivateRefCountEntry() is much simpler.

> You could possibly even arrange it so that
> it's known which array entry needs to be used and then the "record" part
> is just a couple of inline instructions, so that it'd be OK to do that
> while still holding the spinlock.  Otherwise it would still be a good idea
> to do the "record" after releasing the spinlock IMO; but either way this
> avoids the issue of possible state inconsistency due to a midflight
> palloc failure.

I've indeed done it in a way that the reserved entry is
remembered. Primarily because that will, in many situations, allow us to
avoid searching the array for a new entry because we can setup a
reserved slot when forgetting a private refcount entry.  While the
previous reservation would make it safe to do the private tracking with
the spinlock held I've moved it to after the release; based on our
observation that it's never used for buffers already locally
pinned. Also added an assert checking that that actually still is the
case.  That observation also allows us to entirely forgo searching the
private refcount array in PinBuffer_locked(), we can just directly enter
the new entry. That is actually visible in profiles that are much larger
than s_b.


I've just written this patch down in one go, so I'll let the topic rest
for a couple days and commit it then after looking through it again.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

--
 Andres Freund                       http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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