Re: Use WALReadFromBuffers in more places

Hi,

On Tue, Oct 15, 2024 at 1:22 AM Jingtang Zhang <mrdrivingduck(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> I've been back to this patch for a while recently. I witness that if a WAL
> writer works fast, the already flushed WAL buffers will be zeroed out and
> re-initialized for future use by AdvanceXLInsertBuffer in
> XLogBackgroundFlush, so that WALReadFromBuffers will miss even though the
> space of WAL buffer is enough. It is much more unfriendly for logical
> walsenders than physical walsenders, because logical ones consume WAL
> slower than physical ones due to the extra decoding phase. Seems that the aim
> of AdvanceXLInsertBuffer in WAL writer contradicts with our reading from
> WAL buffer. Any thoughts?

Thanks for looking at this. Yes, the WAL writers can zero out flushed
buffers before WALReadFromBuffers gets to them. However,
WALReadFromBuffers was intentionally designed as an opportunistic
optimization - it's a "try this first, quickly" approach before
falling back to reading from WAL files. The no-locks design ensures it
never gets in the way of backends generating WAL, which is critical
for overall system performance.

I rebased and attached the v3 patch. I discarded the test extension
patch that demonstrated WALReadFromBuffers' behavior (i.e., waiting
for WAL to be fully copied to WAL buffers with
WaitXLogInsertionsToFinish), as I believe the comment at the top of
WALReadFromBuffers is sufficient documentation. I can reintroduce the
test extension if there's interest.

Thoughts?

--
Bharath Rupireddy
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
RDS Open Source Databases
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com