Re: pg_plan_advice

On Wed, Apr 1, 2026 at 2:34 AM Lukas Fittl <lukas(at)fittl(dot)com> wrote:
> Is there a reason you didn't use GetNamedDSA / GetNamedDSHash for the
> other allocations? (which we have as of fe07100e82b09)

I'm under the impression that GetNamedDSA and GetNamedDSHash exist for
the purposes of making it easy for extensions to coordinate with each
other across backends, rather than being something you're supposed to
use to improve observability. I think it's potentially good for there
to be a way to see the size of every DSA that exists in the system,
but this clearly isn't that, because none of the code in src/backend
uses it when creating DSAs. You might argue that DSAs for short-lived
things like parallel query or parallel VACUUM don't need to be tracked
like this (which seems arguable), but they are also used for
long-lived contexts in the logical replication launcher, by
LISTEN/NOTIFY, by the shared-memory statistics collector, and in
GetSessionDsmHandle(), and those places don't use GetNamedDSA()
either.

Architecturally, I don't like the idea of replacing "having a pointer
to an object" with "being able to look up that object by name". I
think it's good design that pg_stash_advice creates one structure that
serves as a sort of root and then hangs everything else off of that. I
admit that leaves me not knowing quite what to do about the problem of
knowing how much memory it's using, though. Adding a function just to
return size information seems a little clunky, but it might be the
right idea: it could for example return a count of stashes, a count of
entries, the total length of the entries, and the allocated size of
the DSA.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com