On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 7:06 PM Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 5:05 AM Ashutosh Sharma <ashu.coe...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Could you please explain this point once more in detail? I am not quite > > able to understand under what circumstances a buffer would be modified, but > > won't be marked as dirty or a WAL won't be written for it. > > Whenever this branch is taken: > > + if (nskippedItems == noffs) > + goto skip_wal; >
If the above path is taken that means none of the items in the page got changed. As per the following if-check whenever an item in the offnos[] array is found dead or unused, it is skipped (due to continue statement) which means the item is neither marked dead nor it is marked frozen. Now, if this happens for all the items in a page, then the above condition (nskippedItems == noffs) would be true and hence the buffer would remain unchanged, so, we don't mark such a buffer as dirty and neither do any WAL logging for it. This is my understanding, please let me know if I am missing something here. Thank you. if (!ItemIdIsUsed(itemid) || ItemIdIsDead(itemid)) { nskippedItems++; ereport(NOTICE, (errmsg("skipping tid (%u, %u) because it is already marked %s", blkno, offnos[i], ItemIdIsDead(itemid) ? "dead" : "unused"))); continue; } > At this point you have already modified the page, using ItemIdSetDead, > HeapTupleHeaderSet*, and/or directly adjusting htup->infomask. If this > branch is taken, then MarkBufferDirty() and log_newpage_buffer() are > skipped. > -- With Regards, Ashutosh Sharma EnterpriseDB:http://www.enterprisedb.com