Re: [PROPOSAL] Shared Ispell dictionaries

On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 1:52 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 10:18 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> I think the point you've not addressed is that "syscache callback
>>> occurred" does not equate to "object was dropped". Can the code
>>> survive having this occur at any invalidation point?
>>> (CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS testing would soon expose any fallacy there.)
>
>> Well, I'm not advocating for a lack of testing, and
>> CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS testing is a good idea. However, I suspect that
>> calling dsm_detach() from a syscache callback should be fine.
>> Obviously there will be trouble if the surrounding code is still using
>> that mapping, but that would be a bug at some higher level, like using
>> an object without locking it.
>
> No, you're clearly not getting the point. You could have an absolutely
> airtight exclusive lock of any description whatsoever, and that would
> provide no guarantee at all that you don't get a cache flush callback.
> It's only a cache, not a catalog, and it can get flushed for any reason
> or no reason. (That's why we have pin counts on catcache and relcache
> entries, rather than assuming that locking the corresponding object is
> enough.) So I think it's highly likely that unmapping in a syscache
> callback is going to lead quickly to SIGSEGV. The only way it would not
> is if we keep the shared dictionary mapped only in short straight-line
> code segments that never do any other catalog accesses ... which seems
> awkward, inefficient, and error-prone.

Yeah, that's true, but again, you can work around that problem. A DSM
mapping is fundamentally not that different from a backend-private
memory allocation. If you can avoid freeing memory while you're
referencing it -- as the catcache and the syscache clearly do -- you
can avoid it here, too.

> Do we actually need to worry about unmapping promptly on DROP TEXT
> DICTIONARY? It seems like the only downside of not doing that is that
> we'd leak some address space until process exit. If you were thrashing
> dictionaries at some unreasonable rate on a 32-bit host, you might
> eventually run some sessions out of address space; but that doesn't seem
> like a situation that's so common that we need fragile coding to avoid it.

I'm not sure what the situation is here.

--
Robert Haas
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