Add nbtree README section on page recycling.
Consolidate discussion of how VACUUM places pages in the FSM for
recycling by adding a new section that comes after discussion of page
deletion. This structure reflects the fact that page recycling is
explicitly decoupled from page deletion in Lanin & Shasha's paper. Page
recycling in nbtree is an implementation of what the paper calls "the
drain technique".
This decoupling is an important concept for nbtree VACUUM. Searchers
have to detect and recover from concurrent page deletions, but they will
never have to reason about concurrent page recycling. Recycling can
almost always be thought of as a low level garbage collection operation
that asynchronously frees the physical space that backs a logical tree
node. Almost all code need only concern itself with logical tree nodes.
(Note that "logical tree node" is not currently a term of art in the
nbtree code -- this all works implicitly.)
This is preparation for an upcoming patch that teaches nbtree VACUUM to
remember the details of pages that it deletes on the fly, in local
memory. This enables the same VACUUM operation to consider placing its
own deleted pages in the FSM later on, when it reaches the end of
btvacuumscan().
Branch
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master
Details
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https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/b071a311495bbf42ddf2466a556d033df8f0f5e7
Modified Files
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src/backend/access/nbtree/README | 73 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------------
1 file changed, 52 insertions(+), 21 deletions(-)