Re: Reducing the chunk header sizes on all memory context types

Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> On 2022-09-08 14:10:36 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> No, I don't think we can get away with that. See int8inc() for a
>> counterexample.

> What I was suggesting a bit below the bit quoted above, was that we'd copy
> whenever there's no finalfunc or if the finalfunc doesn't take an internal
> parameter.

Hmm, OK, I was confusing this with the optimization for transition
functions; but that one is looking for pointer equality rather than
checking MemoryContextContains. So maybe this'd work.

> This business with interpreting random memory as a palloc'd chunk seems like a
> fundamentally wrong approach worth incurring some pain to fix.

I hate to give up MemoryContextContains altogether. The assertions
that David nuked in b76fb6c2a had some value I think, and I was hoping
to address your concerns in [1] by adding Assert(MemoryContextContains())
to guc_free. But I'm not sure how much that'll help to diagnose you-
malloced-instead-of-pallocing if the result is not an assertion failure
but a segfault in a not-obviously-related place. The failure at guc_free
is already going to be some distance from the scene of the crime.

The implementation I suggested upthread would reliably distinguish
malloc from palloc, and while it is potentially a tad expensive
I don't think it's too much so for Assert checks. I don't have an
objection to trying to get to a place where we only use it in
Assert, though.

regards, tom lane

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20220905233233.jhcu5jqsrtosmgh5%40awork3.anarazel.de