Originally, Postgres Lists were a more or less exact reimplementation of
Lisp lists, which consist of chains of separately-allocated cons cells,
each having a value and a next-cell link. We'd hacked that once before
(commit d0b4399d8) to add a separate List header, but the data was still
in cons cells. That makes some operations -- notably list_nth() -- O(N),
and it's bulky because of the next-cell pointers and per-cell palloc
overhead, and it's very cache-unfriendly if the cons cells end up
scattered around rather than being adjacent.
In this rewrite, we still have List headers, but the data is in a
resizable array of values, with no next-cell links. Now we need at
most two palloc's per List, and often only one, since we can allocate
some values in the same palloc call as the List header. (Of course,
extending an existing List may require repalloc's to enlarge the array.
But this involves just O(log N) allocations not O(N).)
Of course this is not without downsides. The key difficulty is that
addition or deletion of a list entry may now cause other entries to
move, which it did not before.
For example, that breaks foreach() and sister macros, which historically
used a pointer to the current cons-cell as loop state. We can repair
those macros transparently by making their actual loop state be an
integer list index; the exposed "ListCell *" pointer is no longer state
carried across loop iterations, but is just a derived value. (In
practice, modern compilers can optimize things back to having just one
loop state value, at least for simple cases with inline loop bodies.)
In principle, this is a semantics change for cases where the loop body
inserts or deletes list entries ahead of the current loop index; but
I found no such cases in the Postgres code.
The change is not at all transparent for code that doesn't use foreach()
but chases lists "by hand" using lnext(). The largest share of such
code in the backend is in loops that were maintaining "prev" and "next"
variables in addition to the current-cell pointer, in order to delete
list cells efficiently using list_delete_cell(). However, we no longer
need a previous-cell pointer to delete a list cell efficiently. Keeping
a next-cell pointer doesn't work, as explained above, but we can improve
matters by changing such code to use a regular foreach() loop and then
using the new macro foreach_delete_current() to delete the current cell.
(This macro knows how to update the associated foreach loop's state so
that no cells will be missed in the traversal.)
There remains a nontrivial risk of code assuming that a ListCell *
pointer will remain good over an operation that could now move the list
contents. To help catch such errors, list.c can be compiled with a new
define symbol DEBUG_LIST_MEMORY_USAGE that forcibly moves list contents
whenever that could possibly happen. This makes list operations
significantly more expensive so it's not normally turned on (though it
is on by default if USE_VALGRIND is on).
There are two notable API differences from the previous code:
* lnext() now requires the List's header pointer in addition to the
current cell's address.
* list_delete_cell() no longer requires a previous-cell argument.
These changes are somewhat unfortunate, but on the other hand code using
either function needs inspection to see if it is assuming anything
it shouldn't, so it's not all bad.
Programmers should be aware of these significant performance changes:
* list_nth() and related functions are now O(1); so there's no
major access-speed difference between a list and an array.
* Inserting or deleting a list element now takes time proportional to
the distance to the end of the list, due to moving the array elements.
(However, it typically *doesn't* require palloc or pfree, so except in
long lists it's probably still faster than before.) Notably, lcons()
used to be about the same cost as lappend(), but that's no longer true
if the list is long. Code that uses lcons() and list_delete_first()
to maintain a stack might usefully be rewritten to push and pop at the
end of the list rather than the beginning.
* There are now list_insert_nth...() and list_delete_nth...() functions
that add or remove a list cell identified by index. These have the
data-movement penalty explained above, but there's no search penalty.
* list_concat() and variants now copy the second list's data into
storage belonging to the first list, so there is no longer any
sharing of cells between the input lists. The second argument is
now declared "const List *" to reflect that it isn't changed.
This patch just does the minimum needed to get the new implementation
in place and fix bugs exposed by the regression tests. As suggested
by the foregoing, there's a fair amount of followup work remaining to
do.
Also, the ENABLE_LIST_COMPAT macros are finally removed in this
commit. Code using those should have been gone a dozen years ago.
Patch by me; thanks to David Rowley, Jesper Pedersen, and others
for review.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/11587.1550975080@sss.pgh.pa.us
Commit f2dec34e1 changed things so that printtup's output stringinfo
buffer was allocated outside the per-row temporary context, not inside
it. This creates a need to free that buffer explicitly when the temp
context is freed, but that was overlooked. In most cases, this is all
happening inside a portal or executor context that will go away shortly
anyhow, but that's not always true. Notably, the stringinfo ends up
getting leaked when JDBC uses row-at-a-time fetches. For a query
that returns wide rows, that adds up after awhile.
Per bug #15700 from Matthias Otterbach. Back-patch to v11 where the
faulty code was added.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/15700-8c408321a87d56bb@postgresql.org
There's three categories of changes leading to better performance:
- Splitting the per-attribute part of SendRowDescriptionMessage into a
v2 and a v3 version allows avoiding branches for every attribute.
- Preallocating the size of the buffer to be big enough for all
attributes and then using pq_write* avoids unnecessary buffer
size checks & resizing.
- Reusing a persistently allocated StringInfo for all
SendRowDescriptionMessage() invocations avoids repeated allocations
& reallocations.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170914063418.sckdzgjfrsbekae4@alap3.anarazel.de
This avoids newly allocating, and then possibly growing, the
stringbuffer for every row. For wide rows this can substantially
reduce memory allocator overhead, at the price of not immediately
reducing memory usage after outputting an especially wide row.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170914063418.sckdzgjfrsbekae4@alap3.anarazel.de
This is a mechanical change in preparation for a later commit that
will change the layout of TupleDesc. Introducing a macro to abstract
the details of where attributes are stored will allow us to change
that in separate step and revise it in future.
Author: Thomas Munro, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=0ZtQ-SpsgCyzzYpsXS6e=kZWqk3g5Ygn3MDV7A8dabUA@mail.gmail.com
While this isn't a lot of code, it's been essentially untestable for
a very long time, because libpq doesn't support anything older than
protocol 2.0, and has not since release 6.3. There's no reason to
believe any other client-side code still uses that protocol, either.
Discussion: <2661.1475849167@sss.pgh.pa.us>
I found that half a dozen (nearly 5%) of our AllocSetContextCreate calls
had typos in the context-sizing parameters. While none of these led to
especially significant problems, they did create minor inefficiencies,
and it's now clear that expecting people to copy-and-paste those calls
accurately is not a great idea. Let's reduce the risk of future errors
by introducing single macros that encapsulate the common use-cases.
Three such macros are enough to cover all but two special-purpose contexts;
those two calls can be left as-is, I think.
While this patch doesn't in itself improve matters for third-party
extensions, it doesn't break anything for them either, and they can
gradually adopt the simplified notation over time.
In passing, change TopMemoryContext to use the default allocation
parameters. Formerly it could only be extended 8K at a time. That was
probably reasonable when this code was written; but nowadays we create
many more contexts than we did then, so that it's not unusual to have a
couple hundred K in TopMemoryContext, even without considering various
dubious code that sticks other things there. There seems no good reason
not to let it use growing blocks like most other contexts.
Back-patch to 9.6, mostly because that's still close enough to HEAD that
it's easy to do so, and keeping the branches in sync can be expected to
avoid some future back-patching pain. The bugs fixed by these changes
don't seem to be significant enough to justify fixing them further back.
Discussion: <21072.1472321324@sss.pgh.pa.us>
If a Gather node has read as many tuples as it needs (for example, due
to Limit) it may detach the queue connecting it to the worker before
reading all of the worker's tuples. Rather than let the worker
continue to generate and send all of the results, have it stop after
sending the next tuple.
More could be done here to stop the worker even quicker, but this is
about as well as we can hope to do for 9.6.
This is in response to a problem report from Andreas Seltenreich.
Commit 44339b892a should be actually be
sufficient to fix that example even without this change, but it seems
better to do this, too, since we might otherwise waste quite a large
amount of effort in one or more workers.
Discussion: CAA4eK1KOKGqmz9bGu+Z42qhRwMbm4R5rfnqsLCNqFs9j14jzEA@mail.gmail.com
Amit Kapila
Historically, printtup() has assumed that it could prevent memory leakage
by pfree'ing the string result of each output function and manually
managing detoasting of toasted values. This amounts to assuming that
datatype output functions never leak any memory internally; an assumption
we've already decided to be bogus elsewhere, for example in COPY OUT.
range_out in particular is known to leak multiple kilobytes per call, as
noted in bug #8573 from Godfried Vanluffelen. While we could go in and fix
that leak, it wouldn't be very notationally convenient, and in any case
there have been and undoubtedly will again be other leaks in other output
functions. So what seems like the best solution is to run the output
functions in a temporary memory context that can be reset after each row,
as we're doing in COPY OUT. Some quick experimentation suggests this is
actually a tad faster than the retail pfree's anyway.
This patch fixes all the variants of printtup, except for debugtup()
which is used in standalone mode. It doesn't seem worth worrying
about query-lifespan leaks in standalone mode, and fixing that case
would be a bit tedious since debugtup() doesn't currently have any
startup or shutdown functions.
While at it, remove manual detoast management from several other
output-function call sites that had copied it from printtup(). This
doesn't make a lot of difference right now, but in view of recent
discussions about supporting "non-flattened" Datums, we're going to
want that code gone eventually anyway.
Back-patch to 9.2 where range_out was introduced. We might eventually
decide to back-patch this further, but in the absence of known major
leaks in older output functions, I'll refrain for now.
Valgrind "client requests" in aset.c and mcxt.c teach Valgrind and its
Memcheck tool about the PostgreSQL allocator. This makes Valgrind
roughly as sensitive to memory errors involving palloc chunks as it is
to memory errors involving malloc chunks. Further client requests in
PageAddItem() and printtup() verify that all bits being added to a
buffer page or furnished to an output function are predictably-defined.
Those tests catch failures of C-language functions to fully initialize
the bits of a Datum, which in turn stymie optimizations that rely on
_equalConst(). Define the USE_VALGRIND symbol in pg_config_manual.h to
enable these additions. An included "suppression file" silences nominal
errors we don't plan to fix.
Reviewed in earlier versions by Peter Geoghegan and Korry Douglas.
that a Portal is a useful and sufficient additional argument for
CreateDestReceiver --- it just isn't, in most cases. Instead formalize
the approach of passing any needed parameters to the receiver separately.
One unexpected benefit of this change is that we can declare typedef Portal
in a less surprising location.
This patch is just code rearrangement and doesn't change any functionality.
I'll tackle the HOLD-cursor-vs-toast problem in a follow-on patch.
plpgsql support to come later. Along the way, convert execMain's
SELECT INTO support into a DestReceiver, in order to eliminate some ugly
special cases.
Jonah Harris and Tom Lane
that apply the necessary domain constraint checks immediately. This fixes
cases where domain constraints went unchecked for statement parameters,
PL function local variables and results, etc. We can also eliminate existing
special cases for domains in places that had gotten it right, eg COPY.
Also, allow domains over domains (base of a domain is another domain type).
This almost worked before, but was disallowed because the original patch
hadn't gotten it quite right.
functions are not strict, they will be called (passing a NULL first parameter)
during any attempt to input a NULL value of their datatype. Currently, all
our input functions are strict and so this commit does not change any
behavior. However, this will make it possible to build domain input functions
that centralize checking of domain constraints, thereby closing numerous holes
in our domain support, as per previous discussion.
While at it, I took the opportunity to introduce convenience functions
InputFunctionCall, OutputFunctionCall, etc to use in code that calls I/O
functions. This eliminates a lot of grotty-looking casts, but the main
motivation is to make it easier to grep for these places if we ever need
to touch them again.
only one argument. (Per recent discussion, the option to accept multiple
arguments is pretty useless for user-defined types, and would be a likely
source of security holes if it was used.) Simplify call sites of
output/send functions to not bother passing more than one argument.
few palloc's. I also chose to eliminate the restype and restypmod fields
entirely, since they are redundant with information stored in the node's
contained expression; re-examining the expression at need seems simpler
and more reliable than trying to keep restype/restypmod up to date.
initdb forced due to change in contents of stored rules.
of tuples when passing data up through multiple plan nodes. A slot can now
hold either a normal "physical" HeapTuple, or a "virtual" tuple consisting
of Datum/isnull arrays. Upper plan levels can usually just copy the Datum
arrays, avoiding heap_formtuple() and possible subsequent nocachegetattr()
calls to extract the data again. This work extends Atsushi Ogawa's earlier
patch, which provided the key idea of adding Datum arrays to TupleTableSlots.
(I believe however that something like this was foreseen way back in Berkeley
days --- see the old comment on ExecProject.) A test case involving many
levels of join of fairly wide tables (about 80 columns altogether) showed
about 3x overall speedup, though simple queries will probably not be
helped very much.
I have also duplicated some code in heaptuple.c in order to provide versions
of heap_formtuple and friends that use "bool" arrays to indicate null
attributes, instead of the old convention of "char" arrays containing either
'n' or ' '. This provides a better match to the convention used by
ExecEvalExpr. While I have not made a concerted effort to get rid of uses
of the old routines, I think they should be deprecated and eventually removed.
of a composite type to get that type's OID as their second parameter,
in place of typelem which is useless. The actual changes are mostly
centralized in getTypeInputInfo and siblings, but I had to fix a few
places that were fetching pg_type.typelem for themselves instead of
using the lsyscache.c routines. Also, I renamed all the related variables
from 'typelem' to 'typioparam' to discourage people from assuming that
they necessarily contain array element types.
loop over the fields instead of a loop around heap_getattr. This is
considerably faster (O(N) instead of O(N^2)) when there are nulls or
varlena fields, since those prevent use of attcacheoff. Replace loops
over heap_getattr with heap_deformtuple in situations where all or most
of the fields have to be fetched, such as printtup and tuptoaster.
Profiling done more than a year ago shows that this should be a nice
win for situations involving many-column tables.
Bruce Momjian