This adds a set of magical environment variables that can be used to
tweak the database parameters. It's totally undocumented and not
intended to be a long term or supported thing.
It's ugly, but there is a backstory. I have a couple of large
installations where the database options are inefficient or otherwise
suboptimal (24/7 compaction going on and stuff like that). I don't
*know* the correct database parameters, nor yet the formula or method to
derive them by, so this requires experimentation. Experimentation needs
to happen partly in production, and rolling out new builds for every
tweak isn't practical. This provides override points for all reasonable
values, while not changing anything by default.
Ideally, at the end of such experimentation, we'll know which values are
relevant to change and in what manner, and can provide a more user
friendly knob to do so - or do it automatically based on the database
size.
There was a problem in iterating the sequence index that could result
in missing updates. The issue is that while the index was (correctly)
iterated in a snapshot, the actual file infos were read dirty outside of
the snapshot. This fixes this by doing the reads inside the snapshot,
and also updates a couple of other places that did the same thing more
or less harmfully (I didn't investigate).
To avoid similar issues in the future I did some renaming of the
getFile* methods - the ones in a transaction are just getFile, while the
ones directly on the database are variants of getFileDirty to highlight
what's going on.
Jakob Borg
Simon Frei