Re: small parallel restore optimization

From: Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net>
To: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: small parallel restore optimization
Date: 2009-03-09 01:45:44
Message-ID: 49B474C8.6090000@dunslane.net
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Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
>
>> I have found the source of the problem I saw. dumputils.c:fmtId() uses a
>> static PQExpBuffer which it initialises the first time it's called. This
>> gets clobbered by simultaneous calls by Windows threads.
>>
>> I could just make it auto and set it up on each call, but that could
>> result in a non-trivial memory leak ... it's probably called a great
>> many times. Or I could provide a parallel version where we pass in a
>> PQExpBuffer that we create, one per thread, and is used by anything
>> called by the parallel code. That seems like a bit of a potential
>> footgun, though.
>>
>
> Could you use a different static PQExpBuffer on each thread?
> pthread_getspecific sort of thing, only to be used on Windows.
>

For MSVC we could declare it with "_declspec(thread)" and it would be
allocated in thread-local storage, but it looks like this isn't
supported on Mingw.

> BTW does fmtQualifiedId have the same problem?
>
>

Yes, but it's not called in threaded code - it's only in pg_dump and
only pg_restore is threaded.

cheers

andrew

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