Forced cache invalidation (CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS) has been impractical
to use for testing in PostgreSQL because it's so slow and because it's
toggled on/off only at build time. It is helpful when hunting bugs in
any code that uses the sycache/relcache because causes cache
invalidations to be injected whenever it would be possible for an
invalidation to occur, whether or not one was really pending.
Address this by providing run-time control over cache clobber
behaviour using the new debug_invalidate_system_caches_always GUC.
Support is not compiled in at all unless assertions are enabled or
CLOBBER_CACHE_ENABLED is explicitly defined at compile time. It
defaults to 0 if compiled in, so it has negligible effect on assert
build performance by default.
When support is compiled in, test code can now set
debug_invalidate_system_caches_always=1 locally to a backend to test
specific queries, functions, extensions, etc. Or tests can toggle it
globally for a specific test case while retaining normal performance
during test setup and teardown.
For backwards compatibility with existing test harnesses and scripts,
debug_invalidate_system_caches_always defaults to 1 if
CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS is defined, and to 3 if CLOBBER_CACHE_RECURSIVE
is defined.
CLOBBER_CACHE_ENABLED is now visible in pg_config_manual.h, as is the
related RECOVER_RELATION_BUILD_MEMORY setting for the relcache.
Author: Craig Ringer <craig.ringer@2ndquadrant.com>
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAMsr+YF=+ctXBZj3ywmvKNUjWpxmuTuUKuv-rgbHGX5i5pLstQ@mail.gmail.com