Re: LogwrtResult contended spinlock

So I've been wondering about this block at the bottom of XLogWrite:

/*
* Make sure that the shared 'request' values do not fall behind the
* 'result' values. This is not absolutely essential, but it saves some
* code in a couple of places.
*/
{
SpinLockAcquire(&XLogCtl->info_lck);
if (XLogCtl->LogwrtRqst.Write < LogwrtResult.Write)
XLogCtl->LogwrtRqst.Write = LogwrtResult.Write;
if (XLogCtl->LogwrtRqst.Flush < LogwrtResult.Flush)
XLogCtl->LogwrtRqst.Flush = LogwrtResult.Flush;
SpinLockRelease(&XLogCtl->info_lck);
}

I just noticed that my 0001 makes the comment a lie: it is now quite
possible that 'result' is advanced beyond 'request'. Before the patch
that never happened because they were both advanced in the region locked
by the spinlock.

I think we could still maintain this promise if we just moved this
entire block before the first pg_atomic_monotonic_advance_u64 setting
XLogCtl->LogwrtResult.Write. Or we could halve the whole block, and put
one acquire/test/set/release stanza before each monotonic increase of
the corresponding variable.

However, I wonder if this is still necessary. This code was added in
4d14fe0048c (March 2001) and while everything else was quite different
back then, this hasn't changed at all. I can't quite figure out what
are those "couple of places" that would need additional code if this
block is just removed. I tried running the tests (including
wal_consistency_checking), and nothing breaks. Reading the code
surrounding the other accesses of XLogCtl->LogwrtRqst, there's nothing
that looks to me like it depends on these values not lagging behind
LogwrtResult.

--
Álvaro Herrera PostgreSQL Developer — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
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