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Tom Lane 1e0fb6a2c6 Use SnapshotDirty rather than an active snapshot to probe index endpoints.
If there are lots of uncommitted tuples at the end of the index range,
get_actual_variable_range() ends up fetching each one and doing an MVCC
visibility check on it, until it finally hits a visible tuple.  This is
bad enough in isolation, considering that we don't need an exact answer
only an approximate one.  But because the tuples are not yet committed,
each visibility check does a TransactionIdIsInProgress() test, which
involves scanning the ProcArray.  When multiple sessions do this
concurrently, the ensuing contention results in horrid performance loss.
20X overall throughput loss on not-too-complicated queries is easy to
demonstrate in the back branches (though someone's made it noticeably
less bad in HEAD).

We can dodge the problem fairly effectively by using SnapshotDirty rather
than a normal MVCC snapshot.  This will cause the index probe to take
uncommitted tuples as good, so that we incur only one tuple fetch and test
even if there are many such tuples.  The extent to which this degrades the
estimate is debatable: it's possible the result is actually a more accurate
prediction than before, if the endmost tuple has become committed by the
time we actually execute the query being planned.  In any case, it's not
very likely that it makes the estimate a lot worse.

SnapshotDirty will still reject tuples that are known committed dead, so
we won't give bogus answers if an invalid outlier has been deleted but not
yet vacuumed from the index.  (Because btrees know how to mark such tuples
dead in the index, we shouldn't have a big performance problem in the case
that there are many of them at the end of the range.)  This consideration
motivates not using SnapshotAny, which was also considered as a fix.

Note: the back branches were using SnapshotNow instead of an MVCC snapshot,
but the problem and solution are the same.

Per performance complaints from Bartlomiej Romanski, Josh Berkus, and
others.  Back-patch to 9.0, where the issue was introduced (by commit
40608e7f94).
2014-02-25 16:04:20 -05:00
config Don't reject threaded Python on FreeBSD. 2012-02-20 16:21:41 -05:00
contrib Prevent potential overruns of fixed-size buffers. 2014-02-17 11:20:35 -05:00
doc Stamp 9.0.16. 2014-02-17 14:42:21 -05:00
src Use SnapshotDirty rather than an active snapshot to probe index endpoints. 2014-02-25 16:04:20 -05:00
.gitignore
aclocal.m4
configure Stamp 9.0.16. 2014-02-17 14:42:21 -05:00
configure.in Stamp 9.0.16. 2014-02-17 14:42:21 -05:00
COPYRIGHT Update copyright for 2014 2014-01-07 16:05:29 -05:00
GNUmakefile.in Don't generate plain-text HISTORY and src/test/regress/README anymore. 2014-02-10 20:48:27 -05:00
HISTORY Improve text of stub HISTORY file. 2014-02-12 18:16:41 -05:00
Makefile
README Don't generate plain-text HISTORY and src/test/regress/README anymore. 2014-02-10 20:48:27 -05:00
README.git Don't generate plain-text HISTORY and src/test/regress/README anymore. 2014-02-10 20:48:27 -05:00

PostgreSQL Database Management System
=====================================
  
This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including
transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types
and functions.  This distribution also contains C language bindings.

PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here:

	http://www.postgresql.org/download

See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install
PostgreSQL.  That file also lists supported operating systems and
hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other
software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL
system.  Copyright and license information can be found in the
file COPYRIGHT.  A comprehensive documentation set is included in this
distribution; it can be read as described in the installation
instructions.

The latest version of this software may be obtained at
http://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.