Re: Avoiding unnecessary reads in recovery

I was actually thinking that we could slip this in 8.3. It's a simple, 
well-understood patch, which fixes a little data integrity quirk as well 
as gives a nice recovery speed up.

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> I assume this is 8.4 material.
> 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>> "Simon Riggs" <simon@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
>>>> As regards the zero_damaged_pages question, I raised that some time ago
>>>> but we didn't arrive at an explicit answer. All I would say is we can't
>>>> allow invalid pages in the buffer manager at any time, whatever options
>>>> we have requested, otherwise other code will fail almost immediately.
>>> Yeah --- the proposed new bufmgr routine should probably explicitly zero
>>> the content of the buffer.  It doesn't really matter in the context of
>>> WAL recovery, since there can't be any concurrent access to the buffer,
>>> but it'd make it safe to use in non-WAL contexts (I think there are
>>> other places where we know we are going to init the page and so a
>>> physical read is a waste of time).  
>> To implement that correctly, I think we'd need to take the content lock 
>> to clear the buffer if it's already found in the cache. It doesn't seem 
>> right to me for the buffer manager to do that, in the worst case it 
>> could lead to deadlocks if that function was ever used while holding 
>> another buffer locked.
>>
>> What we could have is the semantics of "Return a buffer, with either 
>> correct contents or completely zeroed out". It would act just like 
>> ReadBuffer if the buffer was already in memory, and zero out the page 
>> otherwise. That's a bit strange semantics to have, but is simple to 
>> implement and works for the use-cases we've been talking about.
>>
>> Patch implementing that attached. I named the function "ReadOrZeroBuffer".
>>
>> -- 
>>    Heikki Linnakangas
>>    EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com
> 
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--   Heikki Linnakangas  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com