Re: WIP: [[Parallel] Shared] Hash

On Wed, Jan 11, 2017 at 11:20 AM, Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com> wrote:
>> If multiple processes are using the same file via the BufFile
>> interface, I think that it is absolutely necessary that there should
>> be a provision to track the "attach count" of the BufFile. Each
>> process that reaches EOXact decrements the attach count and when it
>> reaches 0, the process that reduced it to 0 removes the BufFile. I
>> think anything that's based on the notion that leaders will remove
>> files and workers won't is going to be fragile and limiting, and I am
>> going to push hard against any such proposal.
>
> Okay. My BufFile unification approach happens to assume that backends
> clean up after themselves, but that isn't a ridged assumption (of
> course, these are always temp files, so we reason about them as temp
> files).

Also, to be clear, and to avoid confusion: I don't think anyone wants
an approach "that's based on the notion that leaders will remove files
and workers won't". All that has been suggested is that the backend
that creates the file should be responsible for deleting the file, by
definition. And, that any other backend that may have files owned by
another backend must be sure to not try to access them after the owner
deletes them. (Typically, that would be ensured by some barrier
condition, some dependency, inherent to how the parallel operation is
implemented.)

I will implement the reference count thing.
--
Peter Geoghegan