• Alvaro Herrera's avatar
    Improve concurrency of foreign key locking · 0ac5ad51
    Alvaro Herrera authored
    This patch introduces two additional lock modes for tuples: "SELECT FOR
    KEY SHARE" and "SELECT FOR NO KEY UPDATE".  These don't block each
    other, in contrast with already existing "SELECT FOR SHARE" and "SELECT
    FOR UPDATE".  UPDATE commands that do not modify the values stored in
    the columns that are part of the key of the tuple now grab a SELECT FOR
    NO KEY UPDATE lock on the tuple, allowing them to proceed concurrently
    with tuple locks of the FOR KEY SHARE variety.
    
    Foreign key triggers now use FOR KEY SHARE instead of FOR SHARE; this
    means the concurrency improvement applies to them, which is the whole
    point of this patch.
    
    The added tuple lock semantics require some rejiggering of the multixact
    module, so that the locking level that each transaction is holding can
    be stored alongside its Xid.  Also, multixacts now need to persist
    across server restarts and crashes, because they can now represent not
    only tuple locks, but also tuple updates.  This means we need more
    careful tracking of lifetime of pg_multixact SLRU files; since they now
    persist longer, we require more infrastructure to figure out when they
    can be removed.  pg_upgrade also needs to be careful to copy
    pg_multixact files over from the old server to the new, or at least part
    of multixact.c state, depending on the versions of the old and new
    servers.
    
    Tuple time qualification rules (HeapTupleSatisfies routines) need to be
    careful not to consider tuples with the "is multi" infomask bit set as
    being only locked; they might need to look up MultiXact values (i.e.
    possibly do pg_multixact I/O) to find out the Xid that updated a tuple,
    whereas they previously were assured to only use information readily
    available from the tuple header.  This is considered acceptable, because
    the extra I/O would involve cases that would previously cause some
    commands to block waiting for concurrent transactions to finish.
    
    Another important change is the fact that locking tuples that have
    previously been updated causes the future versions to be marked as
    locked, too; this is essential for correctness of foreign key checks.
    This causes additional WAL-logging, also (there was previously a single
    WAL record for a locked tuple; now there are as many as updated copies
    of the tuple there exist.)
    
    With all this in place, contention related to tuples being checked by
    foreign key rules should be much reduced.
    
    As a bonus, the old behavior that a subtransaction grabbing a stronger
    tuple lock than the parent (sub)transaction held on a given tuple and
    later aborting caused the weaker lock to be lost, has been fixed.
    
    Many new spec files were added for isolation tester framework, to ensure
    overall behavior is sane.  There's probably room for several more tests.
    
    There were several reviewers of this patch; in particular, Noah Misch
    and Andres Freund spent considerable time in it.  Original idea for the
    patch came from Simon Riggs, after a problem report by Joel Jacobson.
    Most code is from me, with contributions from Marti Raudsepp, Alexander
    Shulgin, Noah Misch and Andres Freund.
    
    This patch was discussed in several pgsql-hackers threads; the most
    important start at the following message-ids:
    	AANLkTimo9XVcEzfiBR-ut3KVNDkjm2Vxh+t8kAmWjPuv@mail.gmail.com
    	1290721684-sup-3951@alvh.no-ip.org
    	1294953201-sup-2099@alvh.no-ip.org
    	1320343602-sup-2290@alvh.no-ip.org
    	1339690386-sup-8927@alvh.no-ip.org
    	4FE5FF020200002500048A3D@gw.wicourts.gov
    	4FEAB90A0200002500048B7D@gw.wicourts.gov
    0ac5ad51
pg_upgrade.c 15.9 KB