• Tom Lane's avatar
    Remove dubious micro-optimization in ckpt_buforder_comparator(). · 3afd75ea
    Tom Lane authored
    It seems incorrect to assume that the list of CkptSortItems can never
    contain duplicate page numbers: concurrent activity could result in some
    page getting dropped from a low-numbered buffer and later loaded into a
    high-numbered buffer while BufferSync is scanning the buffer pool.
    If that happened, the comparator would give self-inconsistent results,
    potentially confusing qsort().  Saving one comparison step is not worth
    possibly getting the sort wrong.
    
    So far as I can tell, nothing would actually go wrong given our current
    implementation of qsort().  It might get a bit slower than expected
    if there were a large number of duplicates of one value, but that's
    surely a probability-epsilon case.  Still, the comment is wrong,
    and if we ever switched to another sort implementation it might be
    less forgiving.
    
    In passing, avoid casting away const-ness of the argument pointers;
    I've not seen any compiler complaints from that, but it seems likely
    that some compilers would not like it.
    
    Back-patch to 9.6 where this code came in, just in case I've underestimated
    the possible consequences.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/18437.1515607610@sss.pgh.pa.us
    3afd75ea
bufmgr.c 124 KB