Re: [PATCH] Incremental sort (was: PoC: Partial sort)

Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com>

From: Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com>
To: James Coleman <jtc331@gmail.com>
Cc: Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>, Rafia Sabih <rafia.pghackers@gmail.com>, Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>, Shaun Thomas <shaun.thomas@2ndquadrant.com>, Dmitry Dolgov <9erthalion6@gmail.com>, Alexander Korotkov <a.korotkov@postgrespro.ru>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, PostgreSQL Developers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
Date: 2020-03-14T19:58:22Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments

On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 02:41:09PM -0400, James Coleman wrote:
>
>It looks like the issue is actually into the `tuplecontext`, which is
>currently a child context of `sortcontext`:
>
>#3  0x0000558cd153b565 in AllocSetCheck
>(context=context@entry=0x558cd28e0b70) at aset.c:1573
>1573            Assert(total_allocated == context->mem_allocated);
>(gdb) p total_allocated
>$1 = 16384
>(gdb) p context->mem_allocated
>$2 = 8192
>(gdb) p context->name
>$3 = 0x558cd16c8ccd "Caller tuples"
>
>I stuck in several more AllocSetCheck calls in aset.c and got the
>attached backtrace.
>

I think the problem is pretty simple - tuplesort_reset does call
tuplesort_reset, which resets the sortcontext. But that *deletes* the
tuplecontext, so the state->tuplecontext gets stale. I'd haven't looked
into the exact details, but it clearly confuses the accouting.

The attached patch fixes the issue for me - I'm not claiming it's the
right fix, but it's the simplest thing I could think of. Maybe the
tuplesort_rest should work differently, not sure.

And it seems to resolve the memory leak too - I suspect we've freed the
context (so it was not part of the tree of contexts) but the struct was
still valid and we kept allocating memory in it - but it was invisible
to MemoryContextDump etc.

regards

-- 
Tomas Vondra                  http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services

Commits

  1. Further adjustments to Hashagg EXPLAIN ANALYZE output

  2. Rework EXPLAIN format for incremental sort

  3. Fix typos and improve incremental sort comments

  4. Stabilize incremental_sort tests

  5. Minor improvements in Incremental Sort explain

  6. Consider Incremental Sort paths at additional places

  7. Fix representation of SORT_TYPE_STILL_IN_PROGRESS.

  8. Fix failures in incremental_sort due to number of workers

  9. Fix show_incremental_sort_info with force_parallel_mode

  10. Implement Incremental Sort

  11. Fix handling of "Subplans Removed" field in EXPLAIN output.

  12. Fix EXPLAIN (SETTINGS) to follow policy about when to print empty fields.

  13. Ensure plpgsql result tuples have the right composite type marking.

  14. Propagate sort instrumentation from workers back to leader.

  15. Make new regression test case parallel-safe, and improve its output.

  16. Push limit through subqueries to underlying sort, where possible.

  17. Fix inappropriate printing of never-measured times in EXPLAIN.

  18. Fix some infelicities in EXPLAIN output for parallel query plans.