On the Serializable Snapshot Isolation thread, Heikki pointed out a
collection of objects in an HTAB which didn't really need its key on
VirtualTransactionId, but there isn't really any other useful key,
either. One of these objects may live and die, seeing use from
multiple processes, without ever getting a TransactionId assigned;
and it needs to be in a collection in shared memory the whole time.
This suggests to me that some sort of list would be better.
SHM_QUEUE objects provide the infrastructure for maintaining a
shared memory linked list, but they don't do anything about the
allocation and release of the space for the objects. So it occurs
to me that I'm using an HTAB for this collection because it provides
the infrastructure for managing the memory for the collection,
rather than because I need hash lookup. :-( It works, but that
hardly seems optimal.
Have I missed something we already have which could meet that need?
If not, how would people feel about a ShmList implementation? A
quick first draft for the API (which can almost certainly be
improved, so don't be shy), is:
ShmList ShmInitList(const char *name,
Size entrySize,
int initalEntryAlloc,
int maxExtensions);
Size ShmListEstimateSize(ShmList list);
void *CreateShmListEntry(ShmList list);
void ReleaseShmListEntry(ShmList list, void *entry);
int ShmListSize(ShmList list);
void *ShmListFirst(ShmList list);
void *ShmListNext(ShmList list, void *entry);
I see this as grabbing the initial allocation, filling it with
zeros, and then creating a linked list of available entries.
Internally the entries would be a SHM_QUEUE structure followed by
space for the entrySize passed on init. A "create entry" call would
remove an entry from the available list, link it into the
collection, and return a pointer to the structure. Releasing an
entry would remove it from the collection list, zero it, and link it
to the available list. Hopefully the rest is fairly self-evident --
if not, let me know.
Thoughts?
-Kevin
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