Re: index prefetching

On Mon, Nov 11, 2024 at 1:03 PM Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)bowt(dot)ie> wrote:
> I almost think of "pin held" and "buffer lock held" as synonymous when
> working on the nbtree code, even though you have this one obscure page
> deletion case where that isn't quite true (plus the TID recycle safety
> business imposed by heapam). As far as protecting the structure of the
> index itself is concerned, holding on to buffer pins alone does not
> matter at all.

That makes sense from the point of view of working with the btree code
itself, but from a system-wide perspective, it's weird to pretend like
the pins don't exist or don't matter just because a buffer lock is
also held. I had actually forgotten that the btree code tends to
pin+lock together; now that you mention it, I remember that I knew it
at one point, but it fell out of my head a long time ago...

> I think that this is exactly what I propose to do, said in a different
> way. (Again, I wouldn't have expressed it in this way because it seems
> obvious to me that buffer pins don't have nearly the same significance
> to an index AM as they do to heapam -- they have no value in
> protecting the index structure, or helping an index scan to reason
> about concurrency that isn't due to a heapam issue.)
>
> Does that make sense?

Yeah, it just really throws me for a loop that you're using "pin" to
mean "pin at a time when we don't also hold a lock." The fundamental
purpose of a pin is to prevent a buffer from being evicted while
someone is in the middle of looking at it, and nothing that uses
buffers can possibly work correctly without that guarantee. Everything
you've written in parentheses there is, AFAICT, 100% wrong if you mean
"any pin" and 100% correct if you mean "a pin held without a
corresponding lock."

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com