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.
SPI_execute() and related functions create a CachedPlan, execute it once,
and immediately discard it, so that the functionality offered by
plancache.c is of no value in this code path. And performance measurements
show that the extra data copying and invalidation checking done by
plancache.c slows down simple queries by 10% or more compared to 9.1.
However, enough of the SPI code is shared with functions that do need plan
caching that it seems impractical to bypass plancache.c altogether.
Instead, let's invent a variant version of cached plans that preserves
99% of the API but doesn't offer any of the actual functionality, nor the
overhead. This puts SPI_execute() performance back on par, or maybe even
slightly better, than it was before. This change should resolve recent
complaints of performance degradation from Dong Ye, Pavel Stehule, and
others.
By avoiding data copying, this change also reduces the amount of memory
needed to execute many-statement SPI_execute() strings, as for instance in
a recent complaint from Tomas Vondra.
An additional benefit of this change is that multi-statement SPI_execute()
query strings are now processed fully serially, that is we complete
execution of earlier statements before running parse analysis and planning
on following ones. This eliminates a long-standing POLA violation, in that
DDL that affects the behavior of a later statement will now behave as
expected.
Back-patch to 9.2, since this was a performance regression compared to 9.1.
(In 9.2, place the added struct fields so as to avoid changing the offsets
of existing fields.)
Heikki Linnakangas and Tom Lane
Rewrite plancache.c so that a "cached plan" (which is rather a misnomer
at this point) can support generation of custom, parameter-value-dependent
plans, and can make an intelligent choice between using custom plans and
the traditional generic-plan approach. The specific choice algorithm
implemented here can probably be improved in future, but this commit is
all about getting the mechanism in place, not the policy.
In addition, restructure the API to greatly reduce the amount of extraneous
data copying needed. The main compromise needed to make that possible was
to split the initial creation of a CachedPlanSource into two steps. It's
worth noting in particular that SPI_saveplan is now deprecated in favor of
SPI_keepplan, which accomplishes the same end result with zero data
copying, and no need to then spend even more cycles throwing away the
original SPIPlan. The risk of long-term memory leaks while manipulating
SPIPlans has also been greatly reduced. Most of this improvement is based
on use of the recently-added MemoryContextSetParent primitive.
As proof of concept, modify plpgsql to use the hooks. plpgsql is still
inserting $n symbols textually, but the "back end" of the parsing process now
goes through the ParamRef hook instead of using a fixed parameter-type array,
and then execution only fetches actually-referenced parameters, using a hook
added to ParamListInfo.
Although there's a lot left to be done in plpgsql, this already cures the
"if (TG_OP = 'INSERT' and NEW.foo ...)" problem, as illustrated by the
changed regression test.
uses SPI plans, this finally fixes the ancient gotcha that you can't
drop and recreate a temp table used by a plpgsql function.
Along the way, clean up SPI's API a little bit by declaring SPI plan
pointers as "SPIPlanPtr" instead of "void *". This is cosmetic but
helps to forestall simple programming mistakes. (I have changed some
but not all of the callers to match; there are still some "void *"'s
in contrib and the PL's. This is intentional so that we can see if
anyone's compiler complains about it.)
storing mostly-redundant Query trees in prepared statements, portals, etc.
To replace Query, a new node type called PlannedStmt is inserted by the
planner at the top of a completed plan tree; this carries just the fields of
Query that are still needed at runtime. The statement lists kept in portals
etc. now consist of intermixed PlannedStmt and bare utility-statement nodes
--- no Query. This incidentally allows us to remove some fields from Query
and Plan nodes that shouldn't have been there in the first place.
Still to do: simplify the execution-time range table; at the moment the
range table passed to the executor still contains Query trees for subqueries.
initdb forced due to change of stored rules.
the ProcessUtility case, resulting in an intratransaction memory leak
if a utility command actually did return any tuples, as reported by
Dmitry Karasik. Fix this and also make the behavior more consistent
for cases involving nested SPI operations and multiple query trees,
by ensuring that we store the state locally until it is ready to be
returned to the caller.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
as per recent discussions. Invent SubTransactionIds that are managed like
CommandIds (ie, counter is reset at start of each top transaction), and
use these instead of TransactionIds to keep track of subtransaction status
in those modules that need it. This means that a subtransaction does not
need an XID unless it actually inserts/modifies rows in the database.
Accordingly, don't assign it an XID nor take a lock on the XID until it
tries to do that. This saves a lot of overhead for subtransactions that
are only used for error recovery (eg plpgsql exceptions). Also, arrange
to release a subtransaction's XID lock as soon as the subtransaction
exits, in both the commit and abort cases. This avoids holding many
unique locks after a long series of subtransactions. The price is some
additional overhead in XactLockTableWait, but that seems acceptable.
Finally, restructure the state machine in xact.c to have a more orthogonal
set of states for subtransactions.
performance front, but with feature freeze upon us I think it's time to
drive a stake in the ground and say that this will be in 7.5.
Alvaro Herrera, with some help from Tom Lane.
Both plannable queries and utility commands are now always executed
within Portals, which have been revamped so that they can handle the
load (they used to be good only for single SELECT queries). Restructure
code to push command-completion-tag selection logic out of postgres.c,
so that it won't have to be duplicated between simple and extended queries.
initdb forced due to addition of a field to Query nodes.
command status at the interactive level. SPI_processed, etc are set
in the same way as the returned command status would have been set if
the same querystring were issued interactively. Per gripe from
Michael Paesold 25-Sep-02.
in snapshots, per my proposal of a few days ago. Also, tweak heapam.c
routines (heap_insert, heap_update, heap_delete, heap_mark4update) to
be passed the command ID to use, instead of doing GetCurrentCommandID.
For catalog updates they'll still get passed current command ID, but
for updates generated from the main executor they'll get passed the
command ID saved in the snapshot the query is using. This should fix
some corner cases associated with functions and triggers that advance
current command ID while an outer query is still in progress.
- New functions to create a portal using a prepared/saved
SPI plan or lookup an existing portal by name.
- Functions to fetch/move from/in portals. Results are placed
in the usual SPI_processed and SPI_tuptable, so the entire
set of utility functions can be used to gain attribute access.
- Prepared/saved SPI plans now use their own memory context
and SPI_freeplan(plan) can remove them.
- Tuple result sets (SPI_tuptable) now uses it's own memory
context and can be free'd by SPI_freetuptable(tuptab).
Enhancement of PL/pgSQL
- Uses generic named portals internally in FOR ... SELECT
loops to avoid running out of memory on huge result sets.
- Support for CURSOR and REFCURSOR syntax using the new SPI
functionality. Cursors used internally only need no explicit
transaction block. Refcursor variables can be used inside
of explicit transaction block to pass cursors between main
application and functions.
Jan
for details). It doesn't really do that much yet, since there are no
short-term memory contexts in the executor, but the infrastructure is
in place and long-term contexts are handled reasonably. A few long-
standing bugs have been fixed, such as 'VACUUM; anything' in a single
query string crashing. Also, out-of-memory is now considered a
recoverable ERROR, not FATAL.
Eliminate a large amount of crufty, now-dead code in and around
memory management.
Fix problem with holding off SIGTRAP, SIGSEGV, etc in postmaster and
backend startup.
lists are now plain old garden-variety Lists, allocated with palloc,
rather than specialized expansible-array data allocated with malloc.
This substantially simplifies their handling and eliminates several
sources of memory leakage.
Several basic types of erroneous queries (syntax error, attempt to
insert a duplicate key into a unique index) now demonstrably leak
zero bytes per query.
