Re: Reducing overhead of frequent table locks

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 1:44 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>> I got a bit lost with the description of a potential solution. It
>> seemed like you were unaware that there is a local lock and a shared
>> lock table, maybe just me?
>
> No, I'm not unaware of the local lock table.  The point of this
> proposal is to avoid fighting over the LWLocks that protect the shared
> hash table by allowing some locks to be taken without touching it.

Yes, I got that. I just couldn't work out where mmap came in.

>> Design seemed relatively easy from there: put local lock table in
>> shared memory for all procs. We then have a use_strong_lock at proc
>> and at transaction level. Anybody that wants a strong lock first sets
>> use_strong_lock at proc and transaction level, then copies all local
>> lock data into shared lock table, double checking
>> TransactionIdIsInProgress() each time. Then queues for lock using the
>> now fully set up shared lock table. When transaction with strong lock
>> completes we do not attempt to reset transaction level boolean, only
>> at proc level, since DDL often occurs in groups and we want to avoid
>> flip-flopping quickly between lock share states. Cleanup happens by
>> regularly by bgwriter, perhaps every 10 seconds or so. All locks are
>> still visible for pg_locks.
>
> I'm not following this...

Which bit aren't you following? It's a design outline for how to
implement, deliberately brief to allow a discussion of design
alternatives.

--
 Simon Riggs                   http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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