Over in [1] it is demonstrated that with CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS enabled,
initdb accounts for a full 50% of the runtime of "make check-world"
(well, actually of the buildfarm cycle, which is not quite exactly
that but close). Since initdb certainly doesn't cost that much
normally, I wondered why it is so negatively affected by CCA. Some
perf measuring led me to LookupOpclassInfo, and specifically this bit:
/*
* When testing for cache-flush hazards, we intentionally disable the
* operator class cache and force reloading of the info on each call. This
* is helpful because we want to test the case where a cache flush occurs
* while we are loading the info, and it's very hard to provoke that if
* this happens only once per opclass per backend.
*/
#ifdef CLOBBER_CACHE_ENABLED
if (debug_invalidate_system_caches_always > 0)
opcentry->valid = false;
#endif
Diking that out halves initdb's CCA runtime. Turns out it also
roughly halves the runtime of the core regression tests under CCA,
so this doesn't explain why initdb seems so disproportionately
affected by CCA.
However, seeing that this single choice is accounting for half the
cost of CCA testing, we really have to ask whether it's worth that.
This code was added by my commit 03ffc4d6d of 2007-11-28, about which
I wrote:
Improve test coverage of CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS by having it also force
reloading of operator class information on each use of LookupOpclassInfo.
Had this been in place a year ago, it would have helped me find a bug
in the then-new 'operator family' code. Now that we have a build farm
member testing CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS on a regular basis, it seems worth
expending a little bit of effort here.
I'm now a little dubious about my claim that this would have helped find
any bugs. Invalidating a finished OpClassCache entry does not model any
real-world scenario, because as noted elsewhere in LookupOpclassInfo,
once such a cache entry is populated it is kept for the rest of the
session. Also, the claim in the comment that we need this to test
a cache flush during load seems like nonsense: if we have
debug_invalidate_system_caches_always turned on, then we'll test
the effects of such flushes throughout the initial population of
a cache entry. Doing it over and over again adds nothing.
So I'm now fairly strongly tempted to remove this code outright
(effectively reverting 03ffc4d6d). Another possibility now that
we have debug_invalidate_system_caches_always is to increase the
threshold at which this happens, making it more like
CLOBBER_CACHE_RECURSIVE.
Thoughts?
regards, tom lane
[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/1289102.1625353189%40sss.pgh.pa.us
