On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 3:37 AM, Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
> One thing that I discussed with Merlin offline and am now concerned about is > how will the actual eviction work. We cannot traverse the entire list and then > find all the buffers with refcount 0 and then do another traversal to find the > oldest one.
I thought if there was memory pressure the clock sweep would run and we wouldn't have everything at the max counter access value.
Hmm, I see your point.
With that applicable as well, I feel that the clocksweep counting/logical clock system shall be useful when deciding between multiple candidates for eviction. At worst, it can serve to replace the gettimeofday() calls.
One thing I have thought of with ideas and inputs from Joshua Yanowski offline is that we can probably have a maxheap which is on the logical clock age of buffers. Each time clocksweep sees a buffer whose refcount has become zero, it will push the buffer into minheap. This can be a new representation of freelist or a new additional data structure.
This still does not solve the problem of seeing the entire list by the clocksweep, even if that makes the eviction process O(1) with the addition of the maxheap.
I am working on a PoC patch but am stuck on this point. My current approach sees the entire shared buffers list to search for any candidate buffers.
Another thing that is a pain point here is the concurrency and locking overheads of introducing a new data structure. Can the existing buffer header spinlock handle this problem or is it hitting the granularity of the spinlock too much?
I see some blockers for this idea still. Nevertheless, the point of clocksweep counts as logical clocks seems to be promising,atleast intuitively.
