Re: dynamically allocating chunks from shared memory

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>

From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
To: Kevin Grittner <Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov>
Cc: Markus Wanner <markus@bluegap.ch>, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>, PostgreSQL-development Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2010-07-26T20:27:38Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 3:16 PM, Kevin Grittner
<Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I actually think that memory management is one of the weakest
>> elements of our current architecture
>
> I'm actually pretty impressed by the memory contexts in PostgreSQL.
> Apparently I'm not alone in that, either; a paper by Hellerstein,
> Stonebraker, and Hamilton[1] has this in section 7.2 (Memory
> Allocator):
>
> "The interested reader may want to browse the open-source PostgreSQL
> code. This utilizes a fairly sophisticated memory allocator."
>
> I think the problem here is that we don't extend that sophistication
> to shared memory.

That's one aspect of it, and the other is that we don't have much
global coordination about how we use it.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company