Poor use of caching in rangetypes code

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com>, Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
Cc: pgsql-hackers(at)postgreSQL(dot)org
Subject: Poor use of caching in rangetypes code
Date: 2011-11-13 19:32:23
Message-ID: 18692.1321212743@sss.pgh.pa.us
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While digging around for the cause of the buildfarm failures in the new
rangetypes code, I noticed that range_gettypinfo thinks it can memcpy
the result of fmgr_info(). This is not cool. It's true that fn_extra
is likely to be NULL at the instant the copy occurs, but what will
happen if the called function is using fn_extra is that on *each call*
it will have to re-create whatever data it's caching there. That's not
only bad for performance but it means a per-call memory leak.

It looks like the reason that it's done this way is that some functions
call range_gettypinfo twice, presumably for types that could be
different ... but if they actually were different, then again the
caching would be counterproductive.

I think we need to fix this so that a cached RangeTypeInfo is used
in-place. The places that need two of them will need some extra code
to set up a two-RangeTypeInfo cache area.

Unless you see a hole in this analysis, I will go make the changes.

regards, tom lane

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