Accelerate end-of-transaction dropping of relations

When relations are dropped, at end of transaction we need to remove the
files and clean the buffer pool of buffers containing pages of those
relations.  Previously we would scan the buffer pool once per relation
to clean up buffers.  When there are many relations to drop, the
repeated scans make this process slow; so we now instead pass a list of
relations to drop and scan the pool once, checking each buffer against
the passed list.  When the number of relations is larger than a
threshold (which as of this patch is being set to 20 relations) we sort
the array before starting, and bsearch the array; when it's smaller, we
simply scan the array linearly each time, because that's faster.  The
exact optimal threshold value depends on many factors, but the
difference is not likely to be significant enough to justify making it
user-settable.

This has been measured to be a significant win (a 15x win when dropping
100,000 relations; an extreme case, but reportedly a real one).

Author: Tomas Vondra, some tweaks by me
Reviewed by: Robert Haas, Shigeru Hanada, Andres Freund, Álvaro Herrera

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/include/storage/smgr.h b/src/include/storage/smgr.h
index 4547a0f5180..98b6f131374 100644
--- a/src/include/storage/smgr.h
+++ b/src/include/storage/smgr.h
@@ -85,6 +85,7 @@ extern void smgrcloseall(void);
 extern void smgrclosenode(RelFileNodeBackend rnode);
 extern void smgrcreate(SMgrRelation reln, ForkNumber forknum, bool isRedo);
 extern void smgrdounlink(SMgrRelation reln, bool isRedo);
+extern void smgrdounlinkall(SMgrRelation *rels, int nrels, bool isRedo);
 extern void smgrdounlinkfork(SMgrRelation reln, ForkNumber forknum, bool isRedo);
 extern void smgrextend(SMgrRelation reln, ForkNumber forknum,
 		   BlockNumber blocknum, char *buffer, bool skipFsync);