plpgsql often just remembers SPI-result tuple tables in local variables,
and has no mechanism for freeing them if an ereport(ERROR) causes an escape
out of the execution function whose local variable it is. In the original
coding, that wasn't a problem because the tuple table would be cleaned up
when the function's SPI context went away during transaction abort.
However, once plpgsql grew the ability to trap exceptions, repeated
trapping of errors within a function could result in significant
intra-function-call memory leakage, as illustrated in bug #8279 from
Chad Wagner.
We could fix this locally in plpgsql with a bunch of PG_TRY/PG_CATCH
coding, but that would be tedious, probably slow, and prone to bugs of
omission; moreover it would do nothing for similar risks elsewhere.
What seems like a better plan is to make SPI itself responsible for
freeing tuple tables at subtransaction abort. This patch attacks the
problem that way, keeping a list of live tuple tables within each SPI
function context. Currently, such freeing is automatic for tuple tables
made within the failed subtransaction. We might later add a SPI call to
mark a tuple table as not to be freed this way, allowing callers to opt
out; but until someone exhibits a clear use-case for such behavior, it
doesn't seem worth bothering.
A very useful side-effect of this change is that SPI_freetuptable() can
now defend itself against bad calls, such as duplicate free requests;
this should make things more robust in many places. (In particular,
this reduces the risks involved if a third-party extension contains
now-redundant SPI_freetuptable() calls in error cleanup code.)
Even though the leakage problem is of long standing, it seems imprudent
to back-patch this into stable branches, since it does represent an API
semantics change for SPI users. We'll patch this in 9.3, but live with
the leakage in older branches.
This replaces the former global variable PLy_curr_procedure, and provides
a place to stash per-call-level information. In particular we create a
per-call-level scratch memory context.
For the moment, the scratch context is just used to avoid leaking memory
from datatype output function calls in PLyDict_FromTuple. There probably
will be more use-cases in future.
Although this is a fix for a pre-existing memory leakage bug, it seems
sufficiently invasive to not want to back-patch; it feels better as part
of the major rearrangement of plpython code that we've already done as
part of 9.2.
Jan Urbański
This moves the code around from one huge file into hopefully logical
and more manageable modules. For the most part, the code itself was
not touched, except: PLy_function_handler and PLy_trigger_handler were
renamed to PLy_exec_function and PLy_exec_trigger, because they were
not actually handlers in the PL handler sense, and it makes the naming
more similar to the way PL/pgSQL is organized. The initialization of
the procedure caches was separated into a new function
init_procedure_caches to keep the hash tables private to
plpy_procedures.c.
Jan Urbański and Peter Eisentraut
