Re: refactoring relation extension and BufferAlloc(), faster COPY

On 2/21/23 3:12 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
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> Hi,
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> On 2023-02-21 15:00:15 -0600, Jim Nasby wrote:
>> Some food for thought: I think it's also completely fine to extend any
>> relation over a certain size by multiple blocks, regardless of concurrency.
>> E.g. 10 extra blocks on an 80MB relation is 0.1%. I don't have a good feel
>> for what algorithm would make sense here; maybe something along the lines of
>> extend = max(relpages / 2048, 128); if extend < 8 extend = 1; (presumably
>> extending by just a couple extra pages doesn't help much without
>> concurrency).
> I previously implemented just that. It's not easy to get right. You can easily
> end up with several backends each extending the relation by quite a bit, at
> the same time (or you re-introduce contention). Which can end up with a
> relation being larger by a bunch if data loading stops at some point.
>
> We might want that as well at some point, but the approach implemented in the
> patchset is precise and thus always a win, and thus should be the baseline.
Yeah, what I was suggesting would only make sense when there *wasn't* 
contention.