no longer returns buffer pointer, can be gotten from scan;
descriptor; bootstrap can create multi-key indexes;
pg_procname index now is multi-key index; oidint2, oidint4, oidname
are gone (must be removed from regression tests); use System Cache
rather than sequential scan in many places; heap_modifytuple no
longer takes buffer parameter; remove unused buffer parameter in
a few other functions; oid8 is not index-able; remove some use of
single-character variable names; cleanup Buffer variables usage
and scan descriptor looping; cleaned up allocation and freeing of
tuples; 18k lines of diff;
==========================================
What follows is a set of diffs that cleans up the usage of BLCKSZ.
As a side effect, the person compiling the code can change the
value of BLCKSZ _at_their_own_risk_. By that, I mean that I've
tried it here at 4096 and 16384 with no ill-effects. A value
of 4096 _shouldn't_ affect much as far as the kernel/file system
goes, but making it bigger than 8192 can have severe consequences
if you don't know what you're doing. 16394 worked for me, _BUT_
when I went to 32768 and did an initdb, the SCSI driver broke and
the partition that I was running under went to hell in a hand
basket. Had to reboot and do a good bit of fsck'ing to fix things up.
The patch can be safely applied though. Just leave BLCKSZ = 8192
and everything is as before. It basically only cleans up all of the
references to BLCKSZ in the code.
If this patch is applied, a comment in the config.h file though above
the BLCKSZ define with warning about monkeying around with it would
be a good idea.
Darren darrenk@insightdist.com
(Also cleans up some of the #includes in files referencing BLCKSZ.)
==========================================
Reply-To: hackers@hub.org, Dan McGuirk <mcguirk@indirect.com>
To: hackers@hub.org
Subject: [HACKERS] tmin writeback optimization
I was doing some profiling of the backend, and noticed that during a certain
benchmark I was running somewhere between 30% and 75% of the backend's CPU
time was being spent in calls to TransactionIdDidCommit() from
HeapTupleSatisfiesNow() or HeapTupleSatisfiesItself() to determine that
changed rows' transactions had in fact been committed even though the rows'
tmin values had not yet been set.
When a query looks at a given row, it needs to figure out whether the
transaction that changed the row has been committed and hence it should pay
attention to the row, or whether on the other hand the transaction is still
in progress or has been aborted and hence the row should be ignored. If
a tmin value is set, it is known definitively that the row's transaction
has been committed. However, if tmin is not set, the transaction
referred to in xmin must be looked up in pg_log, and this is what the
backend was spending a lot of time doing during my benchmark.
So, implementing a method suggested by Vadim, I created the following
patch that, the first time a query finds a committed row whose tmin value
is not set, sets it, and marks the buffer where the row is stored as
dirty. (It works for tmax, too.) This doesn't result in the boost in
real time performance I was hoping for, however it does decrease backend
CPU usage by up to two-thirds in certain situations, so it could be
rather beneficial in high-concurrency settings.
