Re: Speed up transaction completion faster after many relations are accessed in a transaction

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>

From: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
To: David Rowley <david.rowley@2ndquadrant.com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, "Tsunakawa, Takayuki" <tsunakawa.takay@jp.fujitsu.com>, "pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2019-02-18T23:56:06Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Hi,

On 2019-02-19 12:52:08 +1300, David Rowley wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Feb 2019 at 12:42, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > My own thought about how to improve this situation was just to destroy
> > and recreate LockMethodLocalHash at transaction end (or start)
> > if its size exceeded $some-value.  Leaving it permanently bloated seems
> > like possibly a bad idea, even if we get rid of all the hash_seq_searches
> > on it.
> 
> That seems like a good idea. Although, it would be good to know that
> it didn't add too much overhead dropping and recreating the table when
> every transaction happened to obtain more locks than $some-value.  If
> it did, then maybe we could track the average locks per of recent
> transactions and just ditch the table after the locks are released if
> the locks held by the last transaction exceeded the average *
> 1.something. No need to go near shared memory to do that.

Isn't a large portion of benefits in this patch going to be mooted by
the locking improvements discussed in the other threads? I.e. there's
hopefully not going to be a ton of cases with low overhead where we
acquire a lot of locks and release them very soon after. Sure, for DDL
etc we will, but I can't see this mattering from a performance POV?

I'm not against doing something like Tom proposes, but heuristics with
magic constants like this tend to age purely / are hard to tune well
across systems.

Greetings,

Andres Freund


Commits

  1. Reorder LOCALLOCK structure members to compact the size

  2. Be more careful to not lose sync in the FE/BE protocol.