Re: GIN improvements part 1: additional information

On 01/21/2014 11:35 AM, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> On 01/21/2014 04:02 AM, Tomas Vondra wrote:
>> On 20.1.2014 19:30, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
>>>
>>> Attached is a yet another version, with more bugs fixed and more
>>> comments added and updated. I would appreciate some heavy-testing of
>>> this patch now. If you could re-run the tests you've been using,
>>> that could be great. I've tested the WAL replay by replicating GIN
>>> operations over streaming replication. That doesn't guarantee it's
>>> correct, but it's a good smoke test.
>>
>> I gave it a try - the OOM error seems to be gone, but now get this
>>
>>      PANIC:  cannot insert duplicate items to GIN index page
>>
>> This only happens when building the index incrementally (i.e. using a
>> sequence of INSERT statements into a table with GIN index). When I
>> create a new index on a table (already containing the same dataset) it
>> works just fine.
>>
>> Also, I tried to reproduce the issue by running a simple plpgsql loop
>> (instead of a complex python script):
>>
>> DO LANGUAGE plpgsql $$
>> DECLARE
>>       r tsvector;
>> BEGIN
>>       FOR r IN SELECT body_tsvector FROM data_table LOOP
>>           INSERT INTO idx_table (body_tsvector) VALUES (r);
>>       END LOOP;
>> END$$;
>>
>> where data_table is the table with imported data (the same data I
>> mentioned in the post about OOM errors), and index_table is an empty
>> table with a GIN index. And indeed it fails, but only if I run the block
>> in multiple sessions in parallel.
>
> Oh, I see what's going on. I had assumed that there cannot be duplicate
> insertions into the posting tree, but that's dead wrong. The fast
> insertion mechanism depends on a duplicate insertion to do nothing.

Ok, this turned out to be a much bigger change than I thought...

In principle, it's not difficult to eliminate duplicates. However, to
detect a duplicate, you have to check if the item is present in the
uncompressed items array, or in the compressed lists. That requires
decoding the segment where it should be.

But if we decode the segment, what's the purpose of the uncompressed
items array? Its purpose was to speed up insertions, by buffering them
so that we don't need to decode and re-encode the page/segment on every
inserted item. But if we're paying the price of decoding it anyway, we
might as well include the new item and re-encode the segment. The
uncompressed area saves some effort in WAL-logging, as the record of
inserting an entry into the uncompressed area is much smaller than that
of re-encoding part of the page, but if that really is a concern, we
could track more carefully which parts of the page is modified, and only
WAL-log the required parts. And hopefully, the fast-update lists buffer
inserts so that you insert many items at a time to the posting tree, and
the price of re-encoding is only paid once.

So, now that I think about this once more, I don't think the
uncompressed area in every leaf page is a good idea.

I refactored the way the recompression routine works again. It is now
more clearly a multi-step process. First, the existing page is
"disassembled" into an in-memory struct, which is a linked list of all
the segments. In-memory each segment can be represented as an array of
item pointers, or in the compressed format. In the next phase, all the
new items are added to the segments where they belong. This naturally
can lead to overly large segments; in the third phase, the items are
redistributed among the segments, and compressed back to the compressed
format. Finally, the finished segments are written back to the page, or
pages if it had to be split.

The same subroutines to disassemble and recompress are also used in vacuum.

Attached is what I've got now. This is again quite heavily-changed from
the previous version - sorry for repeatedly rewriting this. I'll
continue testing and re-reviewing this tomorrow.

- Heikki