Re: Do we need so many hint bits?

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 4:42 PM, Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Also, I am wondering about PD_ALL_VISIBLE. It was originally introduced
> in the visibility map patch, apparently as a way to know when to clear
> the VM bit when doing an update. It was then also used for scans, which
> showed a significant speedup. But I wonder: why not just use the
> visibilitymap directly from those places? It can be used for the scan
> because it is crash safe now (not possible before). And since it's only
> one lookup per scanned page,

Wouldn't you need to lock two pages simultaneously, for each table
page, in order to ensure that there are no races?

For a full table scan, that might not be so good.

> then I don't think it would be a measurable
> performance loss there. Inserts/updates/deletes also do a significant
> amount of work, so again, I doubt it's a big drop in performance there
> -- maybe under a lot of concurrency or something.

Your question prompts me to post something I had been wondering.
Might it be worthwhile to break the PD_ALL_VISIBLE / vm equivalence?
Should the vm bit get cleared by a HOT update?

Currently the vm is used only for non-freezing vacuuming and
index-only scans, as far as I know.

For the IOS, it doesn't care which tuple in the chain is visible, as
long as exactly one of them is. So everything it cares about is still
visible.

And anyone can vacuum a block that has only had HOT updates, you don't
need to be dedicated vacuum worker to do that.

I guess one limitation of this as that if the block was populated by
large tuples which then systematically got made smaller by HOT
updates, the free space map would never get updated until the next
vacuum freeze kicked in.

And obviously this would be incompatible with removing the
PD_ALL_VISIBLE, unless we also wanted to eliminate the ability to
short-cut hint bit checks.

Cheers,

Jeff