Commit c6f7f11d8 intended to prevent leaking any PyObject reference
counts in edge cases (such as out-of-memory during string
construction), but actually it introduced a leak in the normal case.
Repeating an error-trapping operation often enough would lead to
session-lifespan memory bloat. The problem is that I failed to
think about the fact that PyObject_GetAttrString() increments the
refcount of the returned PyObject, so that simply walking down the
list of error frame objects causes all but the first one to have
their refcount incremented.
I experimented with several more-or-less-complex ways around that,
and eventually concluded that the right fix is simply to drop the
newly-obtained refcount as soon as we walk to the next frame
object in PLy_traceback. This sounds unsafe, but it's perfectly
okay because the caller holds a refcount on the first frame object
and each frame object holds a refcount on the next one; so the
current frame object can't disappear underneath us.
By the same token, we can simplify the caller's cleanup back to
simply dropping its refcount on the first object. Cleanup of
each frame object will lead in turn to the refcount of the next
one going to zero.
I also added a couple of comments explaining why PLy_elog_impl()
doesn't try to free the strings acquired from PLy_get_spi_error_data()
or PLy_get_error_data(). That's because I got here by looking at a
Coverity complaint about how those strings might get leaked. They
are not leaked, but in testing that I discovered this other leak.
Back-patch, as c6f7f11d8 was. It's a bit nervous-making to be
putting such a fix into v13, which is only a couple weeks from its
final release; but I can't see that leaving a recently-introduced
leak in place is a better idea.
Author: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1203918.1761184159@sss.pgh.pa.us
Backpatch-through: 13
cbfd4d0f88