• Tom Lane's avatar
    Avoid floating-point underflow while tracking buffer allocation rate. · 40d35036
    Tom Lane authored
    When the system is idle for awhile after activity, the "smoothed_alloc"
    state variable in BgBufferSync converges slowly to zero.  With standard
    IEEE float arithmetic this results in several iterations with denormalized
    values, which causes kernel traps and annoying log messages on some
    poorly-designed platforms.  There's no real need to track such small values
    of smoothed_alloc, so we can prevent the kernel traps by forcing it to zero
    as soon as it's too small to be interesting for our purposes.  This issue
    is purely cosmetic, since the iterations don't happen fast enough for the
    kernel traps to pose any meaningful performance problem, but still it seems
    worth shutting up the log messages.
    
    The kernel log messages were previously reported by a number of people,
    but kudos to Greg Matthews for tracking down exactly where they were coming
    from.
    40d35036
bufmgr.c 81.9 KB