Re: asynchronous execution

[ Adjusting subject line to reflect the actual topic of discussion better. ]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 9:29 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 8:45 AM, Amit Khandekar <amitdkhan(dot)pg(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> For e.g., in the above plan which you specified, suppose :
>> 1. Hash Join has called ExecProcNode() for the child foreign scan b, and so
>> is
>> waiting in ExecAsyncWaitForNode(foreign_scan_on_b).
>> 2. The event wait list already has foreign scan on a that is on a different
>> subtree.
>> 3. This foreign scan a happens to be ready, so in
>> ExecAsyncWaitForNode (), ExecDispatchNode(foreign_scan_a) is called,
>> which returns with result_ready.
>> 4. Since it returns result_ready, it's parent node is now inserted in the
>> callbacks array, and so it's parent (Append) is executed.
>> 5. But, this Append planstate is already in the middle of executing Hash
>> join, and is waiting for HashJoin.
>
> Ah, yeah, something like that could happen. I've spent much of this
> week working on a new design for this feature which I think will avoid
> this problem. It doesn't work yet - in fact I can't even really test
> it yet. But I'll post what I've got by the end of the day today so
> that anyone who is interested can look at it and critique.

Well, I promised to post this, so here it is. It's not really working
all that well at this point, and it's definitely not doing anything
that interesting, but you can see the outline of what I have in mind.
Since Kyotaro Horiguchi found that my previous design had a
system-wide performance impact due to the ExecProcNode changes, I
decided to take a different approach here: I created an async
infrastructure where both the requestor and the requestee have to be
specifically modified to support parallelism, and then modified Append
and ForeignScan to cooperate using the new interface. Hopefully that
means that anything other than those two nodes will suffer no
performance impact. Of course, it might have other problems....

Some notes:

- EvalPlanQual rechecks are broken.
- EXPLAIN ANALYZE instrumentation is broken.
- ExecReScanAppend is broken, because the async stuff needs some way
of canceling an async request and I didn't invent anything like that
yet.
- The postgres_fdw changes pretend to be async but aren't actually.
It's just a demo of (part of) the interface at this point.
- The postgres_fdw changes also report all pg-fdw paths as
async-capable, but actually the direct-modify ones aren't, so the
regression tests fail.
- Errors in the executor can leak the WaitEventSet. Probably we need
to modify ResourceOwners to be able to own WaitEventSets.
- There are probably other bugs, too.

Whee!

Note that I've tried to solve the re-entrancy problems by (1) putting
all of the event loop's state inside the EState rather than in local
variables and (2) having the function that is called to report arrival
of a result be thoroughly different than the function that is used to
return a tuple to a synchronous caller.

Comments welcome, if you're feeling brave enough to look at anything
this half-baked.

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