Re: reducing the overhead of frequent table locks, v4

On Thu, 2011-06-30 at 19:25 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> I'm really hurting
> for is some code review.

I'm trying to get my head into this patch. I have a couple questions:

Does this happen to be based on some academic research? I don't
necessarily expect it to be; just thought I'd ask.

Here is my high-level understanding of the approach, please correct me
where I'm mistaken:

Right now, concurrent activity on the same object, even with weak locks,
causes contention because everything has to hit the same global lock
partition. Because we expect an actual conflict to be rare, this patch
kind of turns the burden upside down such that:
(a) those taking weak locks need only acquire a lock on their own lock
in their own PGPROC, which means that it doesn't contend with anyone
else taking out a weak lock; and
(b) taking out a strong lock requires a lot more work, because it needs
to look at every backend in the proc array to see if it has conflicting
locks.

Of course, those things both have some complexity, because the
operations need to be properly synchronized. You force a valid schedule
by using the memory synchronization guarantees provided by taking those
per-backend locks rather than a centralized lock, thus still avoiding
lock contention in the common (weak locks only) case.

Regards,
Jeff Davis