Re: dynamically allocating chunks from shared memory

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> I actually think that memory management is one of the weakest
> elements of our current architecture

I'm actually pretty impressed by the memory contexts in PostgreSQL.
Apparently I'm not alone in that, either; a paper by Hellerstein,
Stonebraker, and Hamilton[1] has this in section 7.2 (Memory
Allocator):

"The interested reader may want to browse the open-source PostgreSQL
code. This utilizes a fairly sophisticated memory allocator."

I think the problem here is that we don't extend that sophistication
to shared memory.

-Kevin

[1] Joseph M. Hellerstein, Michael Stonebraker and James Hamilton.
2007. Architecture of a Database System. Foundations and Trends(R)
in Databases Vol. 1, No. 2 (2007) 141*259.
http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/papers/fntdb07-architecture.pdf