Buffer Allocation Concurrency Limits

In December, Metin (a coworker of mine) discussed an inability to scale a simple task (parallel scans of many independent tables) to many cores (it’s here). As a ramp-up task at Citus I was tasked to figure out what the heck was going on here.

I have a pretty extensive writeup here (whose length is more a result of my inexperience with the workings of PostgreSQL than anything else) and was looking for some feedback.

In short, my conclusion is that a working set larger than memory results in backends piling up on BufFreelistLock. As much as possible I removed anything that could be blamed for this:

Hyper-Threading is disabled
zone reclaim mode is disabled
numactl was used to ensure interleaved allocation
kernel.sched_migration_cost was set to highly disable migration
kernel.sched_autogroup_enabled was disabled
transparent hugepage support was disabled

For a way forward, I was thinking the buffer allocation sections could use some of the atomics Andres added here. Rather than workers grabbing BufFreelistLock to iterate the clock hand until they find a victim, the algorithm could be rewritten in a lock-free style, allowing workers to move the clock hand in tandem.

Alternatively, the clock iteration could be moved off to a background process, similar to what Amit Kapila proposed here.

Is this assessment accurate? I know 9.4 changes a lot about lock organization, but last I looked I didn’t see anything that could alleviate this contention: are there any plans to address this?

—Jason