Horton

Re: [HACKERS] Parallel tuplesort (for parallel B-Tree index creation)

Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>

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From: Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com>, Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@enterprisedb.com>, Rushabh Lathia <rushabh.lathia@gmail.com>, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Corey Huinker <corey.huinker@gmail.com>
Date: 2018-02-06T18:33:45Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments

On Mon, Feb 5, 2018 at 1:45 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote:
>> So, I guess another option might be to call VALGRIND_MAKE_MEM_DEFINED
>> on the buffer.  "We know what we're doing, trust us!"
>>
>> In some ways, that seems better than inserting a suppression, because
>> it only affects the memory in the buffer.
>
> I think that that would also work, and would be simpler, but also
> slightly inferior to using the proposed suppression. If there is
> garbage in logtape.c buffers, we still generally don't want to do
> anything important on the basis of those values. We make one exception
> with the suppression, which is a pretty typical kind of exception to
> make -- don't worry if we write() poisoned bytes, since those are
> bound to be alignment related.
>
> OTOH, as I've said we are generally bound to write some kind of
> logtape.c garbage, which will almost certainly not be of the
> uninitialized memory variety. So, while I feel that the suppression is
> better, the advantage is likely microscopic.

Attached patch does it to the tail of the buffer, as Tom suggested on
the -committers thread.

Note that there is one other place in logtape.c that can write a
partial block like this: LogicalTapeRewindForRead(). I haven't
bothered to do anything there, since it cannot possibly be affected by
this issue for the same reason that serial sorts cannot be -- it's
code that is only used by a tuplesort that really needs to spill to
disk, and merge multiple runs (or for tapes that have already been
frozen, that are expected to never reallocate logtape.c buffers).

-- 
Peter Geoghegan

Commits

  1. Support parallel btree index builds.

  2. Report an ERROR if a parallel worker fails to start properly.

  3. Transfer state pertaining to pending REINDEX operations to workers.

  4. Add a barrier primitive for synchronizing backends.

  5. Allow DML commands that create tables to use parallel query.

  6. Refactor GetOldestXmin() to use flags

  7. Fix regression in parallel planning against inheritance tables.

  8. Don't create "holes" in BufFiles, in the new logtape code.

  9. Simplify the code for logical tape read buffers.

  10. Fix excessive memory consumption in the new sort pre-reading code.

  11. Implement binary heap replace-top operation in a smarter way.

  12. Cosmetic code cleanup in commands/extension.c.

  13. Speed up planner's scanning for parallel-query hazards.

  14. Read from the same worker repeatedly until it returns no tuple.

  15. Improve tuplesort.c to support variable merge order. The original coding