-
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