Bruce Momjian wrote:
Tom Lane wrote:
Bruce Momjian <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
I have been thinking we could improve how quickly VACUUM can expire rows
if we update procArray.xmin more frequently for non-SERIALIZABLE
transactions.
The attached patch updates procArray.xmin in this manner.
This patch is incredibly broken. Didn't you understand what I said
about how we don't track which snapshots are still alive? You can't
advance procArray.xmin past the xmin of the oldest live snapshot in the
backend, and you can't assume that there are no live snapshots at the
places where this patch assumes that. (Open cursors are one obvious
counterexample, but I think there are more.)
To make intra-transaction advancing of xmin possible, we'd need to
explicitly track all of the backend's live snapshots, probably by
introducing a "snapshot cache" manager that gives out tracked refcounts
as we do for some other structures like catcache entries. This might
have some other advantages (I think most of the current CopySnapshot
operations could be replaced by refcount increments) but it's a whole
lot more complicated and invasive than what you've got here.
I updated the patch to save the MyProc->xid at the time the first cursor
is created, and not allow the MyProc->xid to be set lower than that
saved value in the current transaction. It added only a few more lines
to the patch.
It seems to me a lot cleaner to do the reference counting like Tom
suggested. Increase the refcount on CopySnapshot, and decrease it on
FreeSnapshot. Assuming that all callers of CopySnapshot free the
snapshot with FreeSnapshot when they're done with it.
BTW: I really like the idea of doing this. It's a relatively simple
thing to do and gives some immediate benefit. And it opens the door for
more tricks to vacuum more aggressively in the presence of long-running
transactions. And it allows us to vacuum tuples that were inserted and
deleted in the same transactions even while the transaction is still
running, which helps some pathological cases where a transaction updates
a counter column many times within a transaction. We could also use it
to free entries in the new combocids hash table earlier (not that it's a
problem as it is, though).
--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
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