Re: COPY FREEZE and setting PD_ALL_VISIBLE/visibility map bits - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 1/11/21 10:00 PM, Anastasia Lubennikova wrote:
> On 11.01.2021 01:35, Tomas Vondra wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I started looking at this patch again, hoping to get it committed in 
>> this CF, but I think there's a regression in handling TOAST tables 
>> (compared to the v3 patch submitted by Pavan in February 2019).
>>
>> The test I'm running a very simple test (see test.sql):
>>
>> 1) start a transaction
>> 2) create a table with a text column
>> 3) copy freeze data into it
>> 4) use pg_visibility to see how many blocks are all_visible both in the
>>    main table and it's TOAST table
>>
>> For v3 patch (applied on top of 278584b526 and 
>> s/hi_options/ti_options) I get this:
>>
>>            pages           NOT all_visible
>>   ------------------------------------------
>>   main       637                         0
>>   toast    50001                         3
>>
>> There was some discussion about relcache invalidations causing a 
>> couple TOAST pages not be marked as all_visible, etc.
>>
>> However, for this patch on master I get this
>>
>>            pages           NOT all_visible
>>   ------------------------------------------
>>   main       637                         0
>>   toast    50001                     50001
>>
>> So no pages in TOAST are marked as all_visible. I haven't investigated 
>> what's causing this, but IMO that needs fixing to make ths patch RFC.
>>
>> Attached is the test script I'm using, and a v5 of the patch - rebased 
>> on current master, with some minor tweaks to comments etc.
>>
> 
> Thank you for attaching the test script. I reproduced the problem. This 
> regression occurs because TOAST internally uses heap_insert().
> You have asked upthread about adding this optimization to heap_insert().
> 
> I wrote a quick fix, see the attached patch 0002. The TOAST test passes 
> now, but I haven't tested performance or any other use-cases yet.
> I'm going to test it properly in a couple of days and share results.
> 

Thanks. I think it's important to make this work for TOAST tables - it 
often stores most of the data, and it was working in v3 of the patch. I 
haven't looked into the details, but if it's really just due to TOAST 
using heap_insert, I'd say it just confirms the importance of tweaking 
heap_insert too.

> With this change a lot of new code is repeated in heap_insert() and 
> heap_multi_insert(). I think it's fine, because these functions already 
> have a lot in common.
> 

Understood. IMHO a bit of redundancy is not a big issue, but I haven't 
looked at the code yet. Let's get it working first, then we can decide 
if some refactoring is appropriate.


regards

-- 
Tomas Vondra
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company