Re: Curing plpgsql's memory leaks for statement-lifespan values

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Mon, Jul 25, 2016 at 6:04 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> I suppose that a fix based on putting PG_TRY blocks into all the affected
>> functions might be simple enough that we'd risk back-patching it, but
>> I don't really want to go that way.

> try/catch blocks aren't completely free, either, and PL/pgsql is not
> suffering from a deplorable excess of execution speed.

BTW, just to annotate that a bit: I did some measurements and found out
that on my Linux box, creating/deleting a memory context
(AllocSetContextCreate + MemoryContextDelete) is somewhere around 10x
more expensive than a PG_TRY block. This means that the PG_TRY approach
would actually be faster for cases involving only a small number of
statements-needing-local-storage within a single plpgsql function
execution. However, the memory context creation cost is amortized across
repeated executions of a statement, whereas of course PG_TRY won't be.
We can roughly estimate that PG_TRY would lose any time we loop through
the statement in question more than circa ten times. So I believe the
way I want to do it will win speed-wise in cases where it matters, but
it's not entirely an open-and-shut conclusion.

Anyway, there are enough other reasons not to go the PG_TRY route.

regards, tom lane