Horton

Re: Reducing the chunk header sizes on all memory context types

Yura Sokolov <y.sokolov@postgrespro.ru>

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From: Yura Sokolov <y.sokolov@postgrespro.ru>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>
Cc: PostgreSQL Developers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2022-07-17T16:10:12Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
В Вт, 12/07/2022 в 22:41 -0700, Andres Freund пишет:
> Hi,
> 
> On 2022-07-12 10:42:07 -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
> > On 2022-07-12 17:01:18 +1200, David Rowley wrote:
> > > There is at least one. It might be major; to reduce the AllocSet chunk
> > > header from 16 bytes down to 8 bytes I had to get rid of the freelist
> > > pointer that was reusing the "aset" field in the chunk header struct.
> > > This works now by storing that pointer in the actual palloc'd memory.
> > > This could lead to pretty hard-to-trace bugs if we have any code that
> > > accidentally writes to memory after pfree.
> > 
> > Can't we use the same trick for allcations in the freelist as we do for the
> > header in a live allocation? I.e. split the 8 byte header into two and use
> > part of it to point to the next element in the list using the offset from the
> > start of the block, and part of it to indicate the size?
> 
> So that doesn't work because the members in the freelist can be in different
> blocks and those can be further away from each other.
> 
> 
> Perhaps that could still made work somehow: To point to a block we don't
> actually need 64bit pointers, they're always at least of some certain size -
> assuming we can allocate them suitably aligned. And chunks are always 8 byte
> aligned. Unfortunately that doesn't quite get us far enough - assuming a 4kB
> minimum block size (larger than now, but potentially sensible as a common OS
> page size), we still only get to 2^12*8 = 32kB.

Well, we actually have freelists for 11 size classes.
It is just 11 pointers.
We could embed this 88 bytes in every ASet block and then link blocks.
And then in every block have 44 bytes for in-block free lists.
Total overhead is 132 bytes per-block.
Or 110 if we limit block size to 65k*8b=512kb.

With double-linked block lists (176bytes per block + 44bytes for in-block lists
= 220bytes), we could track block fullness and deallocate it if it doesn't
contain any alive alocation. Therefore "generational" and "slab" allocators
will be less useful.

But CPU overhead will be noticeable.

> It'd easily work if we made each context have an array of allocated non-huge
> blocks, so that the blocks can be addressed with a small index. The overhead
> of that could be reduced in the common case by embedding a small constant
> sized array in the Aset.  That might actually be worth trying out.
> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Andres Freund
> 
>

Commits

  1. Harden memory context allocators against bogus chunk pointers.

  2. Improve our ability to detect bogus pointers passed to pfree et al.

  3. Remove MemoryContextContains().

  4. Remove uses of MemoryContextContains in nodeAgg.c and nodeWindowAgg.c.

  5. Temporarily make MemoryContextContains return false

  6. Make MemoryContextContains work correctly again

  7. Make more effort to put a sentinel at the end of allocated memory

  8. Fix some possibly latent bugs in slab.c

  9. Various cleanups of the new memory context header code

  10. Revert "Add missing padding from MemoryChunk struct"

  11. Use MAXALIGN() in calculations using sizeof(SlabBlock)

  12. Add missing padding from MemoryChunk struct

  13. Improve performance of and reduce overheads of memory management