Make large sequential scans and VACUUMs work in a limited-size "ring" of

buffers, rather than blowing out the whole shared-buffer arena.  Aside from
avoiding cache spoliation, this fixes the problem that VACUUM formerly tended
to cause a WAL flush for every page it modified, because we had it hacked to
use only a single buffer.  Those flushes will now occur only once per
ring-ful.  The exact ring size, and the threshold for seqscans to switch into
the ring usage pattern, remain under debate; but the infrastructure seems
done.  The key bit of infrastructure is a new optional BufferAccessStrategy
object that can be passed to ReadBuffer operations; this replaces the former
StrategyHintVacuum API.

This patch also changes the buffer usage-count methodology a bit: we now
advance usage_count when first pinning a buffer, rather than when last
unpinning it.  To preserve the behavior that a buffer's lifetime starts to
decrease when it's released, the clock sweep code is modified to not decrement
usage_count of pinned buffers.

Work not done in this commit: teach GiST and GIN indexes to use the vacuum
BufferAccessStrategy for vacuum-driven fetches.

Original patch by Simon, reworked by Heikki and again by Tom.

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/src/include/access/xlog.h b/src/include/access/xlog.h
index 87ff6aba501..1c741f38fd0 100644
--- a/src/include/access/xlog.h
+++ b/src/include/access/xlog.h
@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@
  * Portions Copyright (c) 1996-2007, PostgreSQL Global Development Group
  * Portions Copyright (c) 1994, Regents of the University of California
  *
- * $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/include/access/xlog.h,v 1.77 2007/05/20 21:08:19 tgl Exp $
+ * $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/include/access/xlog.h,v 1.78 2007/05/30 20:12:02 tgl Exp $
  */
 #ifndef XLOG_H
 #define XLOG_H
@@ -159,6 +159,7 @@ extern bool XLOG_DEBUG;
 
 extern XLogRecPtr XLogInsert(RmgrId rmid, uint8 info, XLogRecData *rdata);
 extern void XLogFlush(XLogRecPtr RecPtr);
+extern bool XLogNeedsFlush(XLogRecPtr RecPtr);
 
 extern void xlog_redo(XLogRecPtr lsn, XLogRecord *record);
 extern void xlog_desc(StringInfo buf, uint8 xl_info, char *rec);