Re: Allow substitute allocators for PGresult.

On 11.11.2011 11:18, Kyotaro HORIGUCHI wrote:
> The comment at the the begging of pqexpbuffer.c says that libpq
> should not rely on palloc(). Besides, Tom Lane said that palloc
> should not be visible outside the backend(*1) and I agree with
> it.
>
> *1: http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/1999-02/msg00364.php
>
> On the other hand, in dblink, dblink-plus (our product!), and
> maybe FDW's connect to other PostgreSQL servers are seem to copy
> the result of the query contained in PGresult into tuple store. I
> guess that this is in order to avoid memory leakage on
> termination in halfway.
>
> But it is rather expensive to copy whole PGresult, and the
> significance grows as the data received gets larger. Furthermore,
> it requires about twice as much memory as the net size of the
> data. And it is fruitless to copy'n modify libpq or reinvent it
> from scratch. So we shall be happy to be able to use palloc's in
> libpq at least for PGresult for such case in spite of the policy.
>
>
> For these reasons, I propose to make allocators for PGresult
> replaceable.

You could use the resource owner mechanism to track them. Register a
callback function with RegisterResourceReleaseCallback(). Whenever a
PGresult is returned from libpq, add it to e.g a linked list, kept in
TopMemoryContext, and also store a reference to CurrentResourceOwner in
the list element. In the callback function, scan through the list and
free all the PGresults associated with the resource owner that's being
released.

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com