Re: Avoid LWLockWaitForVar() for currently held WAL insertion lock in WaitXLogInsertionsToFinish()

Hi,

On 2022-11-24 18:13:10 +0530, Bharath Rupireddy wrote:
> With that said, here's a small improvement I can think of, that is, to
> avoid calling LWLockWaitForVar() for the WAL insertion lock the caller
> of WaitXLogInsertionsToFinish() currently holds. Since
> LWLockWaitForVar() does a bunch of things - holds interrupts, does
> atomic reads, acquires and releases wait list lock and so on, avoiding
> it may be a good idea IMO.

That doesn't seem like a big win. We're still going to call LWLockWaitForVar()
for all the other locks.

I think we could improve this code more significantly by avoiding the call to
LWLockWaitForVar() for all locks that aren't acquired or don't have a
conflicting insertingAt, that'd require just a bit more work to handle systems
without tear-free 64bit writes/reads.

The easiest way would probably be to just make insertingAt a 64bit atomic,
that transparently does the required work to make even non-atomic read/writes
tear free. Then we could trivially avoid the spinlock in
LWLockConflictsWithVar(), LWLockReleaseClearVar() and with just a bit more
work add a fastpath to LWLockUpdateVar(). We don't need to acquire the wait
list lock if there aren't any waiters.

I'd bet that start to have visible effects in a workload with many small
records.

Greetings,

Andres Freund