Re: Do we need so many hint bits?

On Sat, 2012-11-17 at 14:24 +0100, Andres Freund wrote:
> I think the point is that to check whether the visibilitymap bit needs
> to be unset

What's the problem with that? If you already have the VM buffer pinned
(which should be possible if we keep the VM buffer in a longer-lived
structure), then doing the test is almost as cheap as checking
PD_ALL_VISIBLE, because you don't need any locks.

So, the proposal is:
  1. Keep the VM buffer around in a longer-lived structure for scans and
nodeModifyTable.
  2. Replace all tests of PD_ALL_VISIBLE with tests directly against the
VM, hopefully using a buffer that we already have a pin on.

I haven't really dug into this yet, but I don't see any obvious problem.

Regards,
	Jeff Davis