I recently became annoyed while working on patch A that I could not use simplehash in shared memory, and then I became annoyed again while working on patch B that I could not use simplehash in frontend code. So here are a few patches for discussion.
A significant problem in either case is that a simplehash wants to live in a memory context; no such thing exists either for data in shared memory nor in frontend code. However, it seems to be quite easy to provide a way for simplehash to be defined so that it doesn't care about memory contexts. See 0001. As far as frontend code goes, the only other problem I found is that it makes use of elog() to signal some internal-ish messages. It seemed to me that the easiest thing to do was, if FRONTEND is defined, use pg_log_error(...) instead of elog(ERROR, ...). For the one instance of elog(LOG, ...) in simplehash.h, I chose to use pg_log_info(). It's not really equivalent, but it's probably the closest thing that currently exists, and I think it's good enough for what's basically a debugging message. See 0002. I think those changes would also be enough to allow simplehash to be used in a dynamic shared area (DSA). Using it in the main shared memory segment seems more problematic, because simplehash relies on being able to resize the hash table. Shared hash tables must have a fixed maximum size, but with dynahash, we can count on being able to use all of the entries without significant performance degradation. simplehash, on the other hand, uses linear probing and relies on being able to grow the hash table as a way of escaping collisions. By default, the load factor is not permitted to drop below 0.1, so to mimic the collision-avoidance behavior that we get in backend-private uses of simplehash, we'd have to overallocate by 10x, which doesn't seem desirable. I'd really like to have an alternative to dynahash, which is awkward to use and probably not particularly fast, but I'm not sure simplehash is it. Maybe what we really need is a third (or nth) hash table implementation. Thoughts? -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
0001-simplehash-Allow-use-of-simplehash-without-MemoryCon.patch
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0002-simplehash-Allow-use-in-frontend-code.patch
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