Re: shared-memory based stats collector - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

Hello.

At Wed, 04 Jul 2018 17:23:51 -0400, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote in <67470.1530739431@sss.pgh.pa.us>
> Kyotaro HORIGUCHI <horiguchi.kyotaro@lab.ntt.co.jp> writes:
> > At Mon, 2 Jul 2018 14:25:58 -0400, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote in
<CA+TgmoYQhr30eAcgJCi1v0FhA+3RP1FZVnXqSTLe=6fHy9e5oA@mail.gmail.com>
> >> Copying the whole hash table kinds of sucks, partly because of the
> >> time it will take to copy it, but also because it means that memory
> >> usage is still O(nbackends * ntables).  Without looking at the patch,
> >> I'm guessing that you're doing that because we need a way to show each
> >> transaction a consistent snapshot of the data, and I admit that I
> >> don't see another obvious way to tackle that problem.  Still, it would
> >> be nice if we had a better idea.
> 
> > The consistency here means "repeatable read" of an object's stats
> > entry, not a snapshot covering all objects. We don't need to copy
> > all the entries at once following this definition. The attached
> > version makes a cache entry only for requested objects.
> 
> Uh, what?  That's basically destroying the long-standing semantics of
> statistics snapshots.  I do not think we can consider that acceptable.
> As an example, it would mean that scan counts for indexes would not
> match up with scan counts for their tables.

The current stats collector mechanism sends at most 8 table stats
in a single message. Split messages from multiple transactions
can reach to collector in shuffled order. The resulting snapshot
can be "inconsistent" if INQUIRY message comes between such split
messages.  Of course a single meesage would be enough for common
transactions but not for all.

Even though the inconsistency happens more frequently with this
patch, I don't think users expect such strict consistency of
table stats, especially on a busy system. And I believe it's a
good thing if users saw more "useful" information for the relaxed
consistency. (The actual meaning of "useful" is out of the
current focus:p)


Meanwhile, if we should keep the practical-consistency, a giant
lock is out of the question. So we need a transactional stats of
any shape. It can be a whole-image snapshot or a regular MMVC
table, or maybe the current dshash with UNDO logs. Since there
are actually many states, it is inevitable to require storage to
reproduce each state.

I think the consensus is that the whole-image snapshot takes
too-much memory. MMVC is apparently too-much for the purpose.

UNDO logs seems a bit promising. If we looking stats in a long
transaction, the required memory for UNDO information easily
reaches to the same amount with the whole-image snapshot. But I
expect that it is not so common.

I'll consider that apart from the current patch.

regards.

-- 
Kyotaro Horiguchi
NTT Open Source Software Center