strange behaviour on pooled alloc

Hi,

    I'm  continuing  with  the pooled palloc() stuff and am stuck
    with a very  strange  thing.  I've  reverted  my  changes  to
    palloc()  and am doing all the memory block pool handling now
    in aset.c.

    The benefit from this will be that I later  can  easily  make
    palloc() etc. macros.

    The  new  version of the AllocSet...() functions does not use
    ordered set.  it manages the block pools itself. Has the same
    10%  speedup and I expect some more from the macro version of
    palloc(). It aligns small  allocations  to  power  of  2  for
    better  reusability  of  free'd  chunks  which  are held in 8
    different free lists per alloc set depending on  their  size.
    It lost the ability of AllocSetDump() - who need's that?

    First  I  found some bad places where memory is used after it
    has been free'd. One was in the portal manager with a  portal
    memory  context  struct!  I'm  pretty  sure  that I found all
    because  I  tested   by   memset()   'ing   all   memory   on
    AllocSetFree() and AllocSetReset() with different values.

    The  strange behaviour now is that depending on the blocksize
    and the limit for block/single alloction I use for the pools,
    the  portals_p2  regression test fails or not. The failure is
    that the cursor foo24 does  not  return  data  if  the  pools
    blocksize  is  greater/equal  16K and the smallchunk limit is
    2K. It returns the correct row if one of them is  less.  More
    irritating  is  that  it  only  fails  if  run  inside  'make
    runtest'. If I put multiple portals_p2 tests into  the  tests
    list, all fail the same. But if the test is run manually with
    the same psql switches, it succeeds.

    All  this  behaviour  is  identical  on  two   Linux   2.1.88
    installations.  One has gcc-2.8.1 and glibc-2.0.13, the other
    gcc-2.7.2.1 and libc.5.

    I have absolutely no clue what's going  on  here.  Anyone  an
    idea how to track this down?


Jan

--

#======================================================================#
# It's easier to get forgiveness for being wrong than for being right. #
# Let's break this rule - forgive me.                                  #
#======================================== jwieck@debis.com (Jan Wieck) #