Re: Page replacement algorithm in buffer cache - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 3/22/13 7:27 PM, Ants Aasma wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 10:22 PM, Merlin Moncure <mmoncure@gmail.com> wrote:
>> well if you do a non-locking test first you could at least avoid some
>> cases (and, if you get the answer wrong, so what?) by jumping to the
>> next buffer immediately.  if the non locking test comes good, only
>> then do you do a hardware TAS.
>>
>> you could in fact go further and dispense with all locking in front of
>> usage_count, on the premise that it's only advisory and not a real
>> refcount.  so you only then lock if/when it's time to select a
>> candidate buffer, and only then when you did a non locking test first.
>>   this would of course require some amusing adjustments to various
>> logical checks (usage_count <= 0, heh).
>
> Moreover, if the buffer happens to miss a decrement due to a data
> race, there's a good chance that the buffer is heavily used and
> wouldn't need to be evicted soon anyway. (if you arrange it to be a
> read-test-inc/dec-store operation then you will never go out of
> bounds) However, clocksweep and usage_count maintenance is not what is
> causing contention because that workload is distributed. The issue is
> pinning and unpinning. There we need an accurate count and there are
> some pages like index roots that get hit very heavily. Things to do
> there would be in my opinion convert to a futex based spinlock so when
> there is contention it doesn't completely kill performance and then
> try to get rid of the contention. Converting to lock-free pinning
> won't help much here as what is killing us here is the cacheline
> bouncing.
>
> One way to get rid of contention is the buffer nailing idea that
> Robert came up with. If some buffer gets so hot that maintaining
> refcount on the buffer header leads to contention, promote that buffer
> to a nailed status, let everyone keep their pin counts locally and
> sometime later revisit the nailing decision and if necessary convert
> pins back to the buffer header.
>
> One other interesting idea I have seen is closeable scalable nonzero
> indication (C-SNZI) from scalable rw-locks [1]. The idea there is to
> use a tree structure to dynamically stripe access to the shared lock
> counter when contention is detected. Downside is that considerable
> amount of shared memory is needed so there needs to be some way to
> limit the resource usage. This is actually somewhat isomorphic to the
> nailing idea.
>
> The issue with the current buffer management algorithm is that it
> seems to scale badly with increasing shared_buffers. I think the
> improvements should concentrate on finding out what is the problem
> there and figuring out how to fix it. A simple idea to test would be
> to just partition shared buffers along with the whole clock sweep
> machinery into smaller ones, like the buffer mapping hash tables
> already are. This should at the very least reduce contention for the
> clock sweep even if it doesn't reduce work done per page miss.
>
> [1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/mareko/spaa09-scalablerwlocks.pdf

Partitioned clock sweep strikes me as a bad idea... you could certainly get unlucky and end up with a lot of hot stuff
inone partition.
 

Another idea that'sbeen broughht up inthe past is to have something in the background keep a minimum number of buffers
onthe free list. That's how OS VM systems I'm familiar with work, so there's precedent for it.
 

I recall there were at least some theoretical concerns about this, but I don't remember if anyone actually tested the
idea.