Files
neon/pageserver
Arpad Müller fa1f87b268 Make the implementation of DiskBtreeReader::visit non-recursive (#4884)
## Problem

The `DiskBtreeReader::visit` function calls `read_blk` internally, and
while #4863 converted the API of `visit` to async, the internal function
is still recursive. So, analogously to #4838, we turn the recursive
function into an iterative one.

## Summary of changes

First, we prepare the change by moving the for loop outside of the case
switch, so that we only have one loop that calls recursion. Then, we
switch from using recursion to an approach where we store the search
path inside the tree on a stack on the heap.

The caller of the `visit` function can control when the search over the
B-Tree ends, by returning `false` from the closure. This is often used
to either only find one specific entry (by always returning `false`),
but it is also used to iterate over all entries of the B-tree (by always
returning `true`), or to look for ranges (mostly in tests, but
`get_value_reconstruct_data` also has such a use).

Each stack entry contains two things: the block number (aka the block's
offset), and a children iterator. The children iterator is constructed
depending on the search direction, and with the results of a binary
search over node's children list. It is the only thing that survives a
spilling/push to the stack, everything else is reconstructed. In other
words, each stack spill, will, if the search is still ongoing, cause an
entire re-parsing of the node. Theoretically, this would be a linear
overhead in the number of leaves the search visits. However, one needs
to note:

* the workloads to look for a specific entry are just visiting one leaf,
ever, so this is mostly about workloads that visit larger ranges,
including ones that visit the entire B-tree.
* the requests first hit the page cache, so often the cost is just in
terms of node deserialization
* for nodes that only have leaf nodes as children, no spilling to the
stack-on-heap happens (outside of the initial request where the iterator
is `None`). In other words, for balanced trees, the spilling overhead is
$\Theta\left(\frac{n}{b^2}\right)$, where `b` is the branching factor
and `n` is the number of nodes in the tree. The B-Trees in the current
implementation have a branching factor of roughly `PAGE_SZ/L` where
`PAGE_SZ` is 8192, and `L` is `DELTA_KEY_SIZE = 26` or `KEY_SIZE = 18`
in production code, so this gives us an estimate that we'd be re-loading
an inner node for every 99000 leaves in the B-tree in the worst case.

Due to these points above, I'd say that not fully caching the inner
nodes with inner children is reasonable, especially as we also want to
be fast for the "find one specific entry" workloads, where the stack
content is never accessed: any action to make the spilling
computationally more complex would contribute to wasted cycles here,
even if these workloads "only" spill one node for each depth level of
the b-tree (which is practically always a low single-digit number,
Kleppmann points out on page 81 that for branching factor 500, a four
level B-tree with 4 KB pages can store 250 TB of data).

But disclaimer, this is all stuff I thought about in my head, I have not
confirmed it with any benchmarks or data.

Builds on top of #4863, part of #4743
2023-08-10 13:43:13 +02:00
..