Re: Patch: Write Amplification Reduction Method (WARM)

On Fri, Feb 24, 2017 at 12:28 AM, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
wrote:

> Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 03:45:24PM -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>
> > > > and potentially trim the first HOT chain as those tuples become
> > > > invisible.
> > >
> > > That can already happen even without WARM, no?
> >
> > Uh, the point is that with WARM those four early tuples can be removed
> > via a prune, rather than requiring a VACUUM. Without WARM, the fourth
> > tuple can't be removed until the index is cleared by VACUUM.
>
> I *think* that the WARM-updated one cannot be pruned either, because
> it's pointed to by at least one index (otherwise it'd have been a HOT
> update). The ones prior to that can be removed either way.
>
>
No, even the WARM-updated can be pruned and if there are further HOT
updates, those can be pruned too. All indexes and even multiple pointers
from the same index are always pointing to the root of the WARM chain and
that line pointer does not go away unless the entire chain become dead. The
only material difference between HOT and WARM is that since there are two
index pointers from the same index to the same root line pointer, we must
do recheck. But HOT-pruning and all such things remain the same.

Let's take an example. Say, we have a table (a int, b int, c text) and two
indexes on first two columns.

H W
H
(1, 100, 'foo') -----> (1, 100, 'bar') ------> (1, 200, 'bar') -----> (1,
200, 'foo')

The first update will be a HOT update, the second update will be a WARM
update and the third update will again be a HOT update. The first and third
update do not create any new index entry, though the second update will
create a new index entry in the second index. Any further WARM updates to
this chain is not allowed, but further HOT updates are ok.

If all but the last version become DEAD, HOT-prune will remove all of them
and turn the first line pointer into REDIRECT line pointer. At this point,
the first index has one index pointer and the second index has two index
pointers, but all pointing to the same root line pointer, which has not
become REDIRECT line pointer.

Redirect
o-----------------------> (1, 200, 'foo')

I think the part you want (be able to prune the WARM updated tuple) is
> part of what Pavan calls "turning the WARM chain into a HOT chain", so
> not part of the initial patch. Pavan can explain this part better, and
> also set me straight in case I'm wrong in the above :-)
>
>
Umm.. it's a bit different. Without chain conversion, we still don't allow
further WARM updates to the above chain because that might create a third
index pointer and our recheck logic can't cope up with duplicate scans. HOT
updates are allowed though.

The latest patch that I proposed will handle this case and convert such
chains into regular HOT-pruned chains. To do that, we must remove the
duplicate (and now wrong) index pointer to the chain. Once we do that and
change the state on the heap tuple, we can once again do WARM update to
this tuple. Note that in this example the chain has just one tuple, which
will be the case typically, but the algorithm can deal with the case where
there are multiple tuples but with matching index keys.

Hope this helps.

Thanks,
Pavan

--
Pavan Deolasee http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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