Re: Spinlock performance improvement proposal

On Wed, 26 Sep 2001, D. Hageman wrote:

> > > Save for the fact that the kernel can switch between threads faster then
> > > it can switch processes considering threads share the same address space,
> > > stack, code, etc. If need be sharing the data between threads is much
> > > easier then sharing between processes.
> >
> > When using a kernel threading model, it's not obvious to me that the
> > kernel will switch between threads much faster than it will switch
> > between processes. As far as I can see, the only potential savings is
> > not reloading the pointers to the page tables. That is not nothing,
> > but it is also
<major snippage>
> > > I can't comment on the "isolate data" line. I am still trying to figure
> > > that one out.
> >
> > Sometimes you need data which is specific to a particular thread.
>
> When you need data that is specific to a thread you use a TSD (Thread
> Specific Data).
Which Linux does not support with a vengeance, to my knowledge.

As a matter of fact, quote from Linus on the matter was something like
"Solution to slow process switching is fast process switching, not another
kernel abstraction [referring to threads and TSD]". TSDs make
implementation of thread switching complex, and fork() complex.

The question about threads boils down to: Is there far more data that is
shared than unshared? If yes, threads are better, if not, you'll be
abusing TSD and slowing things down.

I believe right now, postgresql' model of sharing only things that need to
be shared is pretty damn good. The only slight problem is overhead of
forking another backend, but its still _fast_.

IMHO, threads would not bring large improvement to postgresql.

Actually, if I remember, there was someone who ported postgresql (I think
it was 6.5) to be multithreaded with major pain, because the requirement
was to integrate with CORBA. I believe that person posted some benchmarks
which were essentially identical to non-threaded postgres...

-alex