Re: BUG #14932: SELECT DISTINCT val FROM table gets stuck in an infinite loop

Todd A. Cook <tcook@blackducksoftware.com>

From: "Todd A. Cook" <tcook@blackducksoftware.com>
To: Tomas Vondra <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com>, <pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org>
Date: 2018-01-25T22:31:34Z
Lists: pgsql-bugs
On 11/27/17 14:17, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 11/27/2017 07:57 PM, tcook@blackducksoftware.com wrote:
>> The following bug has been logged on the website:
>>
>> Bug reference:      14932
>> Logged by:          Todd Cook
>> Email address:      tcook@blackducksoftware.com
>> PostgreSQL version: 10.1
>> Operating system:   CentOS Linux release 7.4.1708 (Core)
>> Description:
>>
>> It hangs on a table with 167834 rows, though it works fine with only 167833
>> rows.  When it hangs, CTRL-C does not interrupt it, and the backend has to
>> be killed to stop it.
>>
> 
> Can you share the query and data, so that we can reproduce the issue?
> 
> Based on the stack traces this smells like a bug in the simplehash,
> introduced in PostgreSQL 10. Perhaps somewhere in tuplehash_grow(),
> which gets triggered for 167834 rows (but not for 167833).

FWIW, changing the guts of hashint8() to

+       if (val >= INT32_MIN && val <= INT32_MAX)
+               return hash_uint32((uint32) val);
+       else
+               return hash_any((unsigned char *) &val, sizeof(val));

allows us to process a full-sized data set of around 900 million rows.  However,
memory usage seemed to be rather excessive (we can only run 7 of these jobs in parallel
on a 128GB system before the OOM killer kicked in, rather than the usual 24); if there's
any interest, I can try to measure exactly how excessive.

-- todd


Commits

  1. Improve bit perturbation in TupleHashTableHash.

  2. Prevent growth of simplehash tables when they're "too empty".

  3. Add stack-overflow guards in set-operation planning.