Re: Make tuple deformation faster

On Tue, 24 Dec 2024 at 02:00, Alexander Lakhin <exclusion@gmail.com> wrote:
> Please look at the following query, which triggers (sometimes not on a
> first run) an assert added with 5983a4cff:

> regression=# SELECT COUNT(*) FROM
> (SELECT (aclexplode(proacl)).* FROM pg_proc) a,
> (SELECT oid FROM pg_proc UNION ALL SELECT oid FROM pg_proc) b;
> WARNING:  terminating connection because of crash of another server process
> ...
> TRAP: failed Assert("memcmp(&snapshot, cattr, sizeof(CompactAttribute)) == 0"), File: "../../../../src/include/access/tupdesc.h", Line: 191, PID: 1302048

This seems to be caused by the Assert code itself rather than an
actual bug. The reason it's not happening every time is because the
query is expensive enough to be parallelised and the Assert failure is
in the parallel worker. The TupleDesc in question is coming from the
type cache, which is in shared memory, and because
TupleDescCompactAttr() calls populate_compact_attribute() and
overwrites the TupleDesc's CompactAttribute, there seems to be some
sort of race condition between the leader and worker regarding the
timing of populate_compact_attribute's memset to zero and the
repopulation of the CompactAttribute.

I added some debug code to compare the two CompactAttributes when the
memcmp returns non-zero and I sometimes see all fields match, even
with adding a 3-byte array at the end so there's no hole at the end of
the struct.

The attached adjusts that Assert code so that a fresh CompactAttribute
is populated instead of modifying the TupleDesc's one.  I'm not sure
if populate_compact_attribute_internal() is exactly the nicest way to
do this. I'll think a bit harder about that. Assume the attached is
POC grade.

(This makes me wonder if there's any race condition hazard in prior
versions regarding the setting of FormData_pg_attribute.attcacheoff)

David