Re: COPY FREEZE and setting PD_ALL_VISIBLE/visibility map bits

On 1/11/21 10:00 PM, Anastasia Lubennikova wrote:
> On 11.01.2021 01:35, Tomas Vondra wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I started looking at this patch again, hoping to get it committed in
>> this CF, but I think there's a regression in handling TOAST tables
>> (compared to the v3 patch submitted by Pavan in February 2019).
>>
>> The test I'm running a very simple test (see test.sql):
>>
>> 1) start a transaction
>> 2) create a table with a text column
>> 3) copy freeze data into it
>> 4) use pg_visibility to see how many blocks are all_visible both in the
>>    main table and it's TOAST table
>>
>> For v3 patch (applied on top of 278584b526 and
>> s/hi_options/ti_options) I get this:
>>
>>            pages           NOT all_visible
>>   ------------------------------------------
>>   main       637                         0
>>   toast    50001                         3
>>
>> There was some discussion about relcache invalidations causing a
>> couple TOAST pages not be marked as all_visible, etc.
>>
>> However, for this patch on master I get this
>>
>>            pages           NOT all_visible
>>   ------------------------------------------
>>   main       637                         0
>>   toast    50001                     50001
>>
>> So no pages in TOAST are marked as all_visible. I haven't investigated
>> what's causing this, but IMO that needs fixing to make ths patch RFC.
>>
>> Attached is the test script I'm using, and a v5 of the patch - rebased
>> on current master, with some minor tweaks to comments etc.
>>
>
> Thank you for attaching the test script. I reproduced the problem. This
> regression occurs because TOAST internally uses heap_insert().
> You have asked upthread about adding this optimization to heap_insert().
>
> I wrote a quick fix, see the attached patch 0002. The TOAST test passes
> now, but I haven't tested performance or any other use-cases yet.
> I'm going to test it properly in a couple of days and share results.
>

Thanks. I think it's important to make this work for TOAST tables - it
often stores most of the data, and it was working in v3 of the patch. I
haven't looked into the details, but if it's really just due to TOAST
using heap_insert, I'd say it just confirms the importance of tweaking
heap_insert too.

> With this change a lot of new code is repeated in heap_insert() and
> heap_multi_insert(). I think it's fine, because these functions already
> have a lot in common.
>

Understood. IMHO a bit of redundancy is not a big issue, but I haven't
looked at the code yet. Let's get it working first, then we can decide
if some refactoring is appropriate.

regards

--
Tomas Vondra
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