Re: WIP: dynahash replacement for buffer table

On 15/10/2014 10:32 AM, Ants Aasma wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 6:19 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>> With regard for using a hash table for the buffer mapping lock I'm
>>> doubtful that any form of separate chaining is the right one. We
>>> currently have a quite noticeable problem with the number of cache
>>> misses in the buffer mapping hash (and also the heavyweight lock mgr) -
>>> if we stay with hashes that's only going to be fundamentally lower than
>>> dynahash if we change the type of hashing. I've had good, *preliminary*,
>>> results using an open addressing + linear probing approach.
>> I'm very skeptical of open addressing + linear probing. Such hash
>> tables tend to degrade over time, because you have to leave tombstones
>> behind to ensure that future scans advance far enough. There's really
>> no way to recover without rebuilding the whole hash table, and
>> eventually it degrades to linear search. If we're spending too much
>> time walking hash chains, I think the solution is to increase the
>> number of buckets so that the chains get shorter.
> What about cuckoo hashing? There was a recent paper on how to do fine
> grained locking with cuckoo hashes. [1]
>
> I'm imagining a bucketized cuckoo hash with 5 item buckets (5-way
> associativity). This allows us to fit the bucket onto 2 regular sized
> cache lines and have 8 bytes left over. Buckets would be protected by
> seqlocks stored in the extra space. On the read side we would only
> need 2 read barriers (basically free on x86), and we are guaranteed to
> have an answer by fetching two pairs of cache lines. We can trade
> memory bandwidth for latency by issuing prefetches (once we add
> primitives for this). Alternatively we can trade insert speed for
> lookup speed by using asymmetrically sized tables.
>
> [1] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~mfreed/docs/cuckoo-eurosys14.pdf
Actually, I'd go with second-chance hashing [2], same number of hash
functions but it's more stable (no infinite loops, for example). Most
probably the techniques from [1] would apply equally well.

[2]
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~michaelm/postscripts/infocom_hardware_submit.pdf

Ryan