I wrote: > Probably the best fix would be to make typcache flushing fully > independent of the relcache, but that would mean making sure that all > ALTER TABLE variants that affect the rowtype will issue an explicit > typcache flush. That seems a bit too invasive to be back-patchable. > I'm not entirely sure this sort of failure can occur without > RELCACHE_FORCE_RELEASE, but I'm definitely not sure it can't, so a > backpatchable fix would be nice.
After a bit more study it seems that there is a reasonably back-patchable approach to this. We can continue to drive flushing of composite-type typcache entries off of relcache flush, but it has to occur when we do RelationCacheInvalidateEntry() or RelationCacheInvalidate() due to a SI invalidate event, not just anytime a relcache entry is closed. We can do that by plugging in a callback function with CacheRegisterRelcacheCallback. Because the callback will only have the relation OID not the type OID, it will have to scan the whole TypeCacheHash to see if there's a matching entry. However, that's not as bad as it sounds, because there aren't likely to be very many entries in that hashtable. I put in some quick-hack instrumentation to see how big the table gets during the regression tests, and find that of the hundred-odd backends launched during the tests, none get above 26 typcache entries, and only 8 get as many as 10 entries. Based on those numbers, I'm not sure it'd ever be worth adding the additional infrastructure to allow a direct hash lookup instead. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers