Re: Extended Prefetching using Asynchronous IO - proposal and patch

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 12:08 PM, John Lumby <johnlumby(at)hotmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> The question is, if you receive the notification of the I/O completion
>> using a signal or a thread, is it safe to release the lwlock from the
>> signal handler or a separate thread?
>
> In the forthcoming new version of the patch that uses sigevent,
> the originator locks a LWlock associated with that BAaiocb eXclusive,
> and , when signalled, in the signal handler it places that LWlock
> on a process-local queue of LWlocks awaiting release.
> (No, It cannot be safely released inside the signal handler or in a
> separate thread). Whenever the mainline passes a CHECK_INTERRUPTS macro
> and at a few additional points in bufmgr, the backend walks this process-local
> queue and releases those LWlocks. This is also done if the originator
> itself issues a ReadBuffer, which is the most frequent case in which it
> is released.

I suggest using a semaphore instead.

Semaphores are supposed to be incremented/decremented from multiple
threads or processes already. So, in theory, the callback itself
should be able to do it.

The problem with the process-local queue is that it may take time to
be processed (the time it takes to get to a CHECK_INTERRUPTS macro,
which as it happened with regexes, it can be quite high).