RE: Copy data to DSA area

Hi, thank you for the comment.

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Kyotaro HORIGUCHI [mailto:horiguchi.kyotaro@lab.ntt.co.jp]
>Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2018 5:09 PM
>
>Hello.
>
>At Wed, 28 Nov 2018 05:13:26 +0000, "Ideriha, Takeshi"
><ideriha.takeshi@jp.fujitsu.com> wrote in
><4E72940DA2BF16479384A86D54D0988A6F3BD73A@G01JPEXMBKW04>
>> Hi
>>
>> >From: Thomas Munro [mailto:thomas.munro@enterprisedb.com]
>> >Here we need something better, because once this new kind of memory
>> >fills up with leaked objects, you have to restart the whole cluster to recover.
>>
>> Thank you for the clarification. I agree that leaving memory leaking
>> in shared memory without freeing it ends up cluster-wide problem.
>
>If some of the "leaked" objects are liked each other with other "live" objects including
>those on local memory, we must tell whether each "maybe-leaked" object is actually
>a leak or not. That looks apprently stupid. Maybe we shouldn't manipulate objects on
>shared memory at such a low-level interface. We would need a kind of resource
>manager for such structures holding shared objects and should (perhaps explicitly)
>register the objects that shuold be free'd on error-exiting from a scope. This seems a
>bit different from reset callbacks of the current MemoryContext.

Sure. We want to get rid of dangling pointer at the error handling but this should be 
transparent. 


>> >If the solution involves significantly different control flows (like
>> >PG_TRY(),
>> >PG_FINALLY() manual cleanup all over the place), then lots of
>> >existing palloc-based code will need to be reviewed and rewritten
>> >very carefully for use in this new kind of memory context.  If it can
>> >be done automagically, then more of our existing code will be able to
>> >participate in the construction of stuff that we want to put in shared memory.
>>
>> About resetting X->a I was thinking about how to treat dangling
>> pointer inside a new memory context machinery instead of using
>> PG_TRY() stuff. That's because putting PG_TRY() all over the place
>> becomes responsible for a developer trying to shared-memory-version
>> MemoryContext and it needs a lot of efforts as you noted. But in my mind even if
>PG_TRY() is used, it only affects new code uses shared-memory version
>MemoryContext and doesn't affect current code.
>> I may be missing something here...
>
>Thomas mentioned exiting upper-layer library code using palloc, like pg_list.  As I
>wrote above, pg_list is one of such feature that would need to be carefully adjusted.

Thank you for the clarification. I think I was misunderstanding. In some previous email 
I suggested "points_to_pallocd_data(pointer, new_data)" to remember old_value and 
do reset a pointer at the time of error handling. Yeah, this interface needs to be implemented 
at existing function wrapping palloc and set the pointer.

>> >I first thought about this in the context of shared plan caches, a
>> >topic that appears on this mailing list from time to time.  There are
>> >some other fun problems, like cache invalidation for shared caches,
>> >space recycling (LRUs etc), and of course locking/concurrency
>> >(dsa_allocate() and dsa_free() are concurrency safe, but whatever
>> >data structures you build with the memory of course need their own plan for
>dealing with concurrency).
>> >But a strategy for clean-up on errors seems to be a major subproblem
>> >to deal with early in the project.  I will be very happy if we can
>> >come up with something :-)
>>
>> Yeah, I hope we can do it somehow.
>
>In addition to recycling issue within a fixed area, I suppose that we will need to
>"expand" the fixed-address shared memory. PROT_NONE could work for that but it
>must break some platforms..
If we are only talking about DSA created in the place of Postgres-initailized shared area,
I think we can prevent memory from expanding using dsa_set_limit_size().

>> Thank you for kind remark.
>> By the way I just thought meta variable "hoge" is used only in Japan
>> :)
>
>I've seen it many-many times including mine in this list, thus why don't you know it is
>already a world-wide jargon? :p

Ah I didn't know that, thanks!

Regards,
Takeshi Ideriha