The primary bottlenecks for relation extension are:
1) The extension lock is held while acquiring a victim buffer for the new
page. Acquiring a victim buffer can require writing out the old page
contents including possibly needing to flush WAL.
2) When extending via ReadBuffer() et al, we write a zero page during the
extension, and then later write out the actual page contents. This can
nearly double the write rate.
3) The existing bulk relation extension infrastructure in hio.c just amortized
the cost of acquiring the relation extension lock, but none of the other
costs.
Unfortunately 1) cannot currently be addressed in a central manner as the
callers to ReadBuffer() need to acquire the extension lock. To address that,
this this commit moves the responsibility for acquiring the extension lock
into bufmgr.c functions. That allows to acquire the relation extension lock
for just the required time. This will also allow us to improve relation
extension further, without changing callers.
The reason we write all-zeroes pages during relation extension is that we hope
to get ENOSPC errors earlier that way (largely works, except for CoW
filesystems). It is easier to handle out-of-space errors gracefully if the
page doesn't yet contain actual tuples. This commit addresses 2), by using the
recently introduced smgrzeroextend(), which extends the relation, without
dirtying the kernel page cache for all the extended pages.
To address 3), this commit introduces a function to extend a relation by
multiple blocks at a time.
There are three new exposed functions: ExtendBufferedRel() for extending the
relation by a single block, ExtendBufferedRelBy() to extend a relation by
multiple blocks at once, and ExtendBufferedRelTo() for extending a relation up
to a certain size.
To avoid duplicating code between ReadBuffer(P_NEW) and the new functions,
ReadBuffer(P_NEW) now implements relation extension with
ExtendBufferedRel(), using a flag to tell ExtendBufferedRel() that the
relation lock is already held.
Note that this commit does not yet lead to a meaningful performance or
scalability improvement - for that uses of ReadBuffer(P_NEW) will need to be
converted to ExtendBuffered*(), which will be done in subsequent commits.
Reviewed-by: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi>
Reviewed-by: Melanie Plageman <melanieplageman@gmail.com>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20221029025420.eplyow6k7tgu6he3@awork3.anarazel.de
Andres Freund
31966b151e