This patch replaces WALInsertLock with a number of WAL insertion slots,
allowing multiple backends to insert WAL records to the WAL buffers
concurrently. This is particularly useful for parallel loading large amounts
of data on a system with many CPUs.
This has one user-visible change: switching to a new WAL segment with
pg_switch_xlog() now fills the remaining unused portion of the segment with
zeros. This potentially adds some overhead, but it has been a very common
practice by DBA's to clear the "tail" of the segment with an external
pg_clearxlogtail utility anyway, to make the WAL files compress better.
With this patch, it's no longer necessary to do that.
This patch adds a new GUC, xloginsert_slots, to tune the number of WAL
insertion slots. Performance testing suggests that the default, 8, works
pretty well for all kinds of worklods, but I left the GUC in place to allow
others with different hardware to test that easily. We might want to remove
that before release.
Reviewed by Andres Freund.
9a20a9b21b