Re: LP_DEAD hinting and not holding on to a buffer pin on leaf page(Was: [HACKERS] [WIP] Zipfian distribution in pgbench)

On Tue, Jul 25, 2017 at 11:02 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote:
> While the benchmark Alik came up with is non-trivial to reproduce, I
> can show a consistent regression for a simple case with only one
> active backend.

That's not good.

> We now see that no update ever kills items within _bt_killitems(),
> because our own update to the index leaf page itself nullifies our
> ability to kill anything, by changing the page LSN from the one
> stashed in the index scan state variable. Fortunately, we are not
> really "self-blocking" dead item cleanup here, because the
> _bt_check_unique() logic for killing all_dead index entries saves the
> day by not caring about LSNs. However, that only happens because the
> index on "aid" is a unique index.

This seems like an oversight.  If we modify the page ourselves, could
we check whether the saved LSN is still current just before, and if
so, update the saved LSN just after?

-- 
Robert Haas
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