Re: Thoughts about NUM_BUFFER_PARTITIONS

On 2/18/24 03:30, Li Japin wrote:
>
>
>> On Feb 10, 2024, at 20:15, Tomas Vondra <tomas(dot)vondra(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> On 2/8/24 14:27, wenhui qiu wrote:
>>> Hi Heikki Linnakangas
>>> I think the larger shared buffer higher the probability of multiple
>>> backend processes accessing the same bucket slot BufMappingLock
>>> simultaneously, （ InitBufTable(NBuffers + NUM_BUFFER_PARTITIONS); When I
>>> have free time, I want to do this test. I have seen some tests, but the
>>> result report is in Chinese
>>>
>>
>> I think Heikki is right this is unrelated to the amount of RAM. The
>> partitions are meant to reduce the number of lock collisions when
>> multiple processes try to map a buffer concurrently. But the machines
>> got much larger in this regard too - in 2006 the common CPUs had maybe
>> 2-4 cores, now it's common to have CPUs with ~100 cores, and systems
>> with multiple of them. OTOH the time spent holing the partition lock
>> should be pretty low, IIRC we pretty much just pin the buffer before
>> releasing it, and the backend should do plenty other expensive stuff. So
>> who knows how many backends end up doing the locking at the same time.
>>
>> OTOH, with 128 partitions it takes just 14 backends to have 50% chance
>> of a conflict, so with enough cores ... But how many partitions would be
>> enough? With 1024 partitions it still takes only 38 backends to get 50%
>> chance of a collision. Better, but considering we now have hundreds of
>> cores, not sure if sufficient.
>>
>> (Obviously, we probably want much lower probability of a collision, I
>> only used 50% to illustrate the changes).
>>
>
> I find it seems need to change MAX_SIMUL_LWLOCKS if we enlarge the NUM_BUFFER_PARTITIONS,
> I didn’t find any comments to describe the relation between MAX_SIMUL_LWLOCKS and
> NUM_BUFFER_PARTITIONS, am I missing someghing?

IMHO the relationship is pretty simple - MAX_SIMUL_LWLOCKS needs to be
higher than NUM_BUFFER_PARTITIONS, so that the backend can acquire all
the partition locks if needed.

There's other places that acquire a bunch of locks, and all of them need
to be careful not to exceed MAX_SIMUL_LWLOCKS. For example gist has
GIST_MAX_SPLIT_PAGES.

regards

--
Tomas Vondra
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