Re: Performance under contention

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Ivan Voras <ivoras(at)freebsd(dot)org> wrote:
> On 7 December 2010 18:37, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 9:59 PM, Jignesh Shah <jkshah(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>> That's exactly what I concluded when I was doing the sysbench simple
>>> read-only test. I had also tried with different lock partitions and it
>>> did not help since they all go after the same table. I think one way
>>> to kind of avoid the problem on the same table is to do more granular
>>> locking (Maybe at page level instead of table level). But then I dont
>>> really understand on how to even create a prototype related to this
>>> one. If you can help create a prototype then I can test it out with my
>>> setup and see if it helps us to catch up with other guys out there.
>>
>> We're trying to lock the table against a concurrent DROP or schema
>> change, so locking only part of it doesn't really work.  I don't
>> really see any way to avoid needing some kind of a lock here; the
>> trick is how to take it quickly.  The main obstacle to making this
>> faster is that the deadlock detector needs to be able to obtain enough
>> information to break cycles, which means we've got to record in shared
>> memory not only the locks that are granted but who has them.
>
> I'm not very familiar with PostgreSQL code but if we're
> brainstorming... if you're only trying to protect against a small
> number of expensive operations (like DROP, etc.) that don't really
> happen often, wouldn't an atomic reference counter be good enough for
> the purpose (e.g. the expensive operations would spin-wait until the
> counter is 0)?

No, because (1) busy-waiting is only suitable for locks that will only
be held for a short time, and an AccessShareLock on a table might be
held while we read 10GB of data in from disk, and (2) that wouldn't
allow for deadlock detection.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company