Re: remove spurious CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY wait

On Tue, 10 Nov 2020 at 03:02, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> writes:
> > Yeah ... it would be much better if we can make it use atomics instead.
>
> I was thinking more like "do we need any locking at all".
>
> Assuming that a proc's vacuumFlags can be set by only the process itself,
> there's no write conflicts to worry about.  On the read side, there's a
> hazard that onlookers will not see the PROC_IN_SAFE_IC flag set; but
> that's not any different from what the outcome would be if they looked
> just before this stanza executes.  And even if they don't see it, at worst
> we lose the optimization being proposed.
>
> There is a question of whether it's important that both copies of the flag
> appear to update atomically ... but that just begs the question "why in
> heaven's name are there two copies?"

Agreed to all of the above, but I think the issue is miniscule because
ProcArrayLock is acquired in LW_EXCLUSIVE mode at transaction commit.
So it doesn't seem like there is much need to optimize this particular
aspect of the patch.

-- 
Simon Riggs                http://www.EnterpriseDB.com/