Re: locking for unique hash indexes

Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com> writes:
> - Invent a new set of lmgr locks; call them "right of insertion" locks,
> and have one for each bucket in the hash index. Only one backend will
> hold the ROI lock for a given bucket at any given time.

Rather than trying to invent a new set of lock IDs (which would be
difficult to squeeze into the page mapping I think), you could encode
this as an appropriate lock mode on the existing set of bucket lock IDs.
It looks like this would work:
HASH_SHARE        -> AccessShareLockunique-insertion lock    -> ShareUpdateExclusiveLockHASH_EXCLUSIVE        ->
AccessExclusiveLock

> Q: Is there a possibility of deadlock here?

I think you would need to set it up so that insertion into a unique
index grabs ShareUpdateExclusiveLock *instead of* AccessShareLock, not
*in addition to*.  Otherwise I think there is indeed some risk.
However, it should be easy enough to do it that way, and there's no
real cost since it's still just one lock acquisition.


> P.S. While we're on the subject on hash indexes and locking, ISTM that
> we could get better concurrent performance in #4 by first acquiring the
> lwlock on a particular bucket page in shared mode, checking if it has
> free space, and only if it does, getting a write lock on it and doing
> the insertion.

The free-space check is cheap enough that I think this would just be a
waste of cycles.
        regards, tom lane