On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 20:02 +0100, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> Gregory Stark wrote:
> > "Heikki Linnakangas" <heikki@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> >
> >> Let's use a normal hash table instead, and use a lock to protect it. If we only
> >> update it every 10 pages or so, the overhead should be negligible. To further
> >> reduce contention, we could modify ReadBuffer to let the caller know if the
> >> read resulted in a physical read or not, and only update the entry when a page
> >> is physically read in. That way all the synchronized scanners wouldn't be
> >> updating the same value, just the one performing the I/O. And while we're at
> >> it, let's use the full relfilenode instead of just the table oid in the hash.
> >
> > It's probably fine to just do that. But if we find it's a performance
> > bottleneck we could probably still manage to avoid the lock except when
> > actually inserting a new hash element. If you just store in the hash an index
> > into an array stored in global memory then you could get away without a lock
> > on the element in the array.
> >
> > It starts to get to be a fair amount of code when you think about how you
> > would reuse elements of the array. That's why I suggest only looking at this
> > if down the road we find that it's a bottleneck.
>
> Another trick you could do is to use acquire the lock conditionally when
> updating it. But I doubt it's a problem anyhow, if we put some sane
> lower limit in there so that it's not used at all for small tables.
>
The more sophisticated the data structure the less able we are to avoid
locking, correct? For instance, if we have an LRU list it might be
tricky or impossible to avoid locking even on just reads.
Regards,Jeff Davis
