• Alvaro Herrera's avatar
    Use "transient" files for blind writes, take 2 · fba105b1
    Alvaro Herrera authored
    "Blind writes" are a mechanism to push buffers down to disk when
    evicting them; since they may belong to different databases than the one
    a backend is connected to, the backend does not necessarily have a
    relation to link them to, and thus no way to blow them away.  We were
    keeping those files open indefinitely, which would cause a problem if
    the underlying table was deleted, because the operating system would not
    be able to reclaim the disk space used by those files.
    
    To fix, have bufmgr mark such files as transient to smgr; the lower
    layer is allowed to close the file descriptor when the current
    transaction ends.  We must be careful to have any other access of the
    file to remove the transient markings, to prevent unnecessary expensive
    system calls when evicting buffers belonging to our own database (which
    files we're likely to require again soon.)
    
    This commit fixes a bug in the previous one, which neglected to cleanly
    handle the LRU ring that fd.c uses to manage open files, and caused an
    unacceptable failure just before beta2 and was thus reverted.
    fba105b1
md.c 50.1 KB