Horton

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

Peter Geoghegan <pg@heroku.com>

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From: Peter Geoghegan <pg@heroku.com>
To: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi>
Cc: Claudio Freire <klaussfreire@gmail.com>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Corey Huinker <corey.huinker@gmail.com>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 2016-12-04T01:29:01Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

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On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 8:28 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg@heroku.com> wrote:
> What do we need to teach pg_restore about parallel CREATE INDEX, if
> anything at all? Could this be as simple as a blanket disabling of
> parallelism for CREATE INDEX from pg_restore? Or, does it need to be
> more sophisticated than that? I suppose that tools like reindexdb and
> pgbench must be considered in a similar way.

I still haven't resolved this question, which seems like the most
important outstanding question, but I attach V6. Changes:

* tuplesort.c was adapted to use the recently committed condition
variables stuff. This made things cleaner. No more ad-hoc WaitLatch()
looping.

* Adapted docs to mention the newly committed max_parallel_workers GUC
in the context of discussing proposed max_parallel_workers_maintenance
GUC.

* Fixed trivial assertion failure bug that could be tripped when a
conventional sort uses very little memory.

-- 
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