Re: Speed up transaction completion faster after many relations are accessed in a transaction

On Mon, 8 Apr 2019 at 02:59, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> David Rowley <david.rowley@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> > hash_get_num_entries() looks cheap enough to me. Can you explain why
> > you think that's too expensive?
>
> What I objected to cost-wise was counting the number of lock
> acquisitions/releases, which seems entirely beside the point.
>
> We *should* be using hash_get_num_entries(), but only to verify
> that the table is empty before resetting it.  The additional bit
> that is needed is to see whether the number of buckets is large
> enough to justify calling the table bloated.

The reason I thought it was a good idea to track some history there
was to stop the lock table constantly being shrunk back to the default
size every time a simple single table query was executed. For example,
a workload repeatably doing:

SELECT * FROM table_with_lots_of_partitions;
SELECT * FROM non_partitioned_table;

I was worried that obtaining locks on the partitioned table would
become a little slower because it would have to expand the hash table
each time the query is executed.

> > As cheap as possible sounds good, but I'm confused at why you think
> > the table will always be empty at the end of transaction.
>
> It's conceivable that it won't be, which is why we need a test.
> I'm simply arguing that if it is not, we can just postpone de-bloating
> till it is.  Session-level locks are so rarely used that there's no
> need to sweat about that case.

That seems fair.  It would certainly simplify the patch.

-- 
 David Rowley                   http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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