This patch makes a number of interrelated changes to reduce the overhead
involved in creating/deleting memory contexts. The key ideas are:
* Include the AllocSetContext header of an aset.c context in its first
malloc request, rather than allocating it separately in TopMemoryContext.
This means that we now always create an initial or "keeper" block in an
aset, even if it never receives any allocation requests.
* Create freelists in which we can save and recycle recently-destroyed
asets (this idea is due to Robert Haas).
* In the common case where the name of a context is a constant string,
just store a pointer to it in the context header, rather than copying
the string.
The first change eliminates a palloc/pfree cycle per context, and
also avoids bloat in TopMemoryContext, at the price that creating
a context now involves a malloc/free cycle even if the context never
receives any allocations. That would be a loser for some common
usage patterns, but recycling short-lived contexts via the freelist
eliminates that pain.
Avoiding copying constant strings not only saves strlen() and strcpy()
overhead, but is an essential part of the freelist optimization because
it makes the context header size constant. Currently we make no
attempt to use the freelist for contexts with non-constant names.
(Perhaps someday we'll need to think harder about that, but in current
usage, most contexts with custom names are long-lived anyway.)
The freelist management in this initial commit is pretty simplistic,
and we might want to refine it later --- but in common workloads that
will never matter because the freelists will never get full anyway.
To create a context with a non-constant name, one is now required to
call AllocSetContextCreateExtended and specify the MEMCONTEXT_COPY_NAME
option. AllocSetContextCreate becomes a wrapper macro, and it includes
a test that will complain about non-string-literal context name
parameters on gcc and similar compilers.
An unfortunate side effect of making AllocSetContextCreate a macro is
that one is now *required* to use the size parameter abstraction macros
(ALLOCSET_DEFAULT_SIZES and friends) with it; the pre-9.6 habit of
writing out individual size parameters no longer works unless you
switch to AllocSetContextCreateExtended.
Internally to the memory-context-related modules, the context creation
APIs are simplified, removing the rather baroque original design whereby
a context-type module called mcxt.c which then called back into the
context-type module. That saved a bit of code duplication, but not much,
and it prevented context-type modules from exercising control over the
allocation of context headers.
In passing, I converted the test-and-elog validation of aset size
parameters into Asserts to save a few more cycles. The original thought
was that callers might compute size parameters on the fly, but in practice
nobody does that, so it's useless to expend cycles on checking those
numbers in production builds.
Also, mark the memory context method-pointer structs "const",
just for cleanliness.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2264.1512870796@sss.pgh.pa.us
Revise aset.c so that all the "private" fields of chunk headers are
marked NOACCESS when outside the module, improving on the previous
coding which protected only requested_size. Fix a couple of corner
case bugs, such as failing to re-protect the header during a failure
exit from AllocSetRealloc, and wrong padding-size calculation for an
oversize allocation request.
Apply the same design to generation.c, and also fix several bugs therein
that I found by dint of hacking the code to use generation.c as the
standard allocator and then running the core regression tests with it.
Notably, we have to track the actual size of each block, else the
wipe_mem call in GenerationReset clears the wrong amount of memory for
an oversize-chunk block; and GenerationCheck needs a way of identifying
freed chunks that isn't fooled by palloc(0). I chose to fix the latter
by resetting the context pointer to NULL in a freed chunk, roughly like
what happens in a freed aset.c chunk.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1eHa4J-0006hI-Q8@gemulon.postgresql.org
Add commentary about what we're doing and why. Apply the method used for
padding in GenerationChunk to AllocChunkData, replacing the rather ad-hoc
solution used in commit 7e3aa03b4. Reorder fields in GenerationChunk so
that the padding calculation will work even if sizeof(size_t) is different
from sizeof(void *) --- likely that will never happen, but we don't need
the assumption if we do it like this. Improve static assertions about
alignment.
In passing, fix a couple of oversights in the "large chunk" path in
GenerationAlloc().
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1eHa4J-0006hI-Q8@gemulon.postgresql.org
Add new style of memory allocator, known as Generational
appropriate for use in cases where memory is allocated
and then freed in roughly oldest first order (FIFO).
Use new allocator for logical decoding’s reorderbuffer
to significantly reduce memory usage and improve performance.
Author: Tomas Vondra
Reviewed-by: Simon Riggs
