On GiST page split, release the locks on child pages before recursing up.
When inserting the downlinks for a split gist page, we used hold the locks
on the child pages until the insertion into the parent - and recursively its
parent if it had to be split too - were all completed. Change that so that
the locks on child pages are released after the insertion in the immediate
parent is done, before recursing further up the tree.
This reduces the number of lwlocks that are held simultaneously. Holding
many locks is bad for concurrency, and in extreme cases you can even hit
the limit of 100 simultaneously held lwlocks in a backend. If you're really
unlucky, you can hit the limit while in a critical section, which brings
down the whole system.
This fixes bug #6629 reported by Tom Forbes. Backpatch to 9.1. The page
splitting code was rewritten in 9.1, and the old code did not have this
problem.
Branch
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master
Details
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http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/3652d72dd45b3ef2ca5e83e8cbd09f78696ad4c4
Modified Files
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src/backend/access/gist/gist.c | 120 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------
1 files changed, 92 insertions(+), 28 deletions(-)