Re: Allow substitute allocators for PGresult.

Hello,

At Fri, 11 Nov 2011 11:29:30 +0200, Heikki Linnakangas wrote
> You could use the resource owner mechanism to track
> them. Register a callback function with
> RegisterResourceReleaseCallback().

Thank you for letting me know about it. I have dug up a message
in pg-hackers refering to the mechanism on discussion about
postgresql-fdw. I'll put further thought into dblink-plus taking
it into account.

By the way, thinking about memory management for the result in
libpq is considerable as another issue.

At Sat, 12 Nov 2011 12:29:50 -0500, Tom Lane wrote
> To start with, the patch proposes exposing some global
> variables that affect the behavior of libpq process-wide. This
> seems like a pretty bad design, because a single process could
> contain multiple usages of libpq

You're right to say the design is bad. I've designed it to have
minimal impact on libpq by limiting usage and imposing any
reponsibility on the users, that is the developers of the modules
using it. If there are any other applications that want to use
their own allocators, there are some points to be considered.

I think it is preferable consiering multi-threading to make libpq
write PGresult into memory blocks passed from the application
like OCI does, instead of letting libpq itself make request for
them.

This approach hands the responsibility of memory management to
the user and gives them the capability to avoid memory exhaustion
by their own measures.

On the other hand, this way could produce the situation that
libpq cannot write all of the data to receive from the server
onto handed memory block. So, the API must be able to return the
partial data to the caller.

More advancing, if libpq could store the result directly into
user-allocated memory space using tuplestore-like interface, it
is better on performance if the final storage is a tuplestore
itself.

I will be happy with the part-by-part passing of result. So I
will think about this as the next issue.

> So I'd feel happier about the patch if it came along with a
> patch to make dblink.c use it to prevent memory leaks.

I take it is about my original patch.

Mmm, I heard that dblink copies received data in PGResult to
tuple store not only because of the memory leak, but less memory
usage (after the copy is finished). I think I could show you the
patch ignoring the latter, but it might take some time for me to
start from understand dblink and tuplestore closely...

If I find RegisterResourceReleaseCallback short for our
requirement, I will show it. If not, I withdraw this patch for
ongoing CF and propose another patch based on the discussion
above at another time.

Please let me have a little more time.

regards,

--
Kyotaro Horiguchi
NTT Open Source Software Center