Re: Memory Accounting - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

I wanted to address a couple of questions Jeff asked me off-list about
Greenplum's implementations of Memory Accounting.

Greenplum has two memory accounting sub-systems -- one is the
MemoryContext-based system proposed here.
The other memory accounting system tracks "logical" memory owners in
global accounts. For example, every node in a plan has an account,
however, there are other execution contexts, such as the parser, which
have their own logical memory accounts.
Notably, this logical memory account system also tracks chunks instead
of blocks.

The rationale for tracking memory at the logical owner level was that
memory for a logical owner may allocate memory across multiple
contexts and a single context may contain memory belonging to several
of these logical owners.

More compellingly, many of the allocations done during execution are
done directly in the per query or per tuple context--as opposed to
being done in their own uniquely named context. Arguably, this is
because those logical owners (a Result node, for example) are not
memory-intensive and thus do not require specific memory accounting.
However, when debugging a memory leak or OOM, the specificity of
logical owner accounts was seen as desirable. A discrepancy between
memory allocated and memory freed in the per query context doesn't
provide a lot of hints as to the source of the leak.
At the least, there was no meaningful way to represent MemoryContext
account balances in EXPLAIN ANALYZE. Where would the TopMemoryContext
be represented, for example.

Also, by using logical accounts, each node in the plan could be
assigned a quota at plan time--because many memory intensive operators
will not have relinquished the memory they hold when other nodes are
executing (e.g. Materialize)--so, instead of granting each node
work_mem, work_mem is divided up into quotas for each operator in a
particular way. This was meant to pave the way for work_mem
enforcement. This is a topic that has come up in various ways in other
forums. For example, in the XPRS thread, the discussion of erroring
out for queries with no "escape mechanism" brought up by Thomas Munro
[1] is a kind of work_mem enforcement (this discussion was focused
more on a proposed session-level memory setting, but it is still
enforcement of a memory setting).
It was also discussed at PGCon this year in an unconference session on
OOM-detection and debugging, runaway query termination, and
session-level memory consumption tracking [2].

The motivation for tracking chunks instead of blocks was to understand
the "actual" memory consumption of different components in the
database. Then, eventually, memory consumption patterns would emerge
and improvements could be made to memory allocation strategies to suit
different use cases--perhaps other implementations of the
MemoryContext API similar to Slab and Generation were envisioned.
Apparently, it did lead to the discovery of some memory fragmentation
issues which were tuned.

I bring these up not just to answer Jeff's question but also to
provide some anecdotal evidence that the patch here is a good base for
other memory accounting and tracking schemes.

Even if HashAgg is the only initial consumer of the memory accounting
framework, we know that tuplesort can make use of it in its current
state as well. And, if another node or component requires
chunk-tracking, they could implement a different MemoryContext API
implementation which uses the MemoryContextData->mem_allocated field
to track chunks instead of blocks by tracking chunks in its alloc/free
functions.

Ideas like logical memory accounting could leverage the mem_allocated
field and build on top of it.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CA%2BhUKGJEMT7SSZRqt-knu_3iLkdscBCe9M2nrhC259FdE5bX7g%40mail.gmail.com
[2] https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/PgCon_2019_Developer_Unconference