On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 6:16 AM, Jayashankar K B <jayashankar...@lnties.com> wrote: > Ok. I did a manual patch and it Postgres 9.1.1 compiled for me without using > the --disable-spinlocks option. > Thanks a lot for the patch. :) > By the way, could you please point me to the explanation on the significance > of spinlocks for Postgres?
spinlocks are used all over the place to synchronize access to shared data structures (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinlock also see here: http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2011/01/locking-in-postgresql.html). you can awkwardly implement them in high level languages like C but typically there are hardware primitives that are much faster and better to use. very generally speaking, spinlocks are a better than semaphores when the lock duration is very short, contention isn't terrible, and the time taken to acquire the lock matters. merlin -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
