limiting hint bit I/O

I whipped up the attached patch tonight.  It's pretty quick and dirty,
so it's possible I've missed something, but the intent is to suppress
writing of hint bits by buffers allocating backends, and by
checkpoints, and write them only from the background writer cleaning
scan.  It therefore should (and does) avoid the problem that the first
scan of a relation after a bulk load is much slower than subsequent
scans.  I used this test case:

create table s as select g,
random()::text||random()::text||random()::text||random()::text from
generate_series(1,1000000) g;

I didn't do any special configuration, so this was large enough to not
fit in shared_buffers, but small enough to fit in the OS cache.  Then
I did this repeatedly:

select sum(1) from s;

Without the patch, the first run took 1602 ms, and subsequent runs
took 207-216 ms.

With the patch, the first run took 270 ms, and subsequent runs
declined very, very slowly.  I got bored after getting down into the
240 ms range and ran VACUUM FREEZE, after which times dropped to about
197 ms.  (This also happens without the patch - VACUUM FREEZE seems to
speed things up a bit more than just setting all the hint bits.)

I find these results pretty depressing.  Obviously, the ~6x speedup on
the first run is great, but even after many runs subsequent runs it
was still 10-15% slower.  Certainly, for some people this patch might
be an improvement, but on the whole I can't see applying it, unless
someone can spot something I've done wrong that casts a different
light on the situation.  I am a little bit at a loss to explain how
I'm getting these results when others posted results that appeared to
show hint bits making very little difference.

Any insights appreciated.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company