Summary:
For transactions, we are using the memtables to validate that there are no write conflicts. But after flushing, we don't have any memtables, and transactions could fail to commit. So we want to someone keep around some extra history to use for conflict checking. In addition, we want to provide a way to increase the size of this history if too many transactions fail to commit.
After chatting with people, it seems like everyone prefers just using Memtables to store this history (instead of a separate history structure). It seems like the best place for this is abstracted inside the memtable_list. I decide to create a separate list in MemtableListVersion as using the same list complicated the flush/installalflushresults logic too much.
This diff adds a new parameter to control how much memtable history to keep around after flushing. However, it sounds like people aren't too fond of adding new parameters. So I am making the default size of flushed+not-flushed memtables be set to max_write_buffers. This should not change the maximum amount of memory used, but make it more likely we're using closer the the limit. (We are now postponing deleting flushed memtables until the max_write_buffer limit is reached). So while we might use more memory on average, we are still obeying the limit set (and you could argue it's better to go ahead and use up memory now instead of waiting for a write stall to happen to test this limit).
However, if people are opposed to this default behavior, we can easily set it to 0 and require this parameter be set in order to use transactions.
Test Plan: Added a xfunc test to play around with setting different values of this parameter in all tests. Added testing in memtablelist_test and planning on adding more testing here.
Reviewers: sdong, rven, igor
Reviewed By: igor
Subscribers: dhruba, leveldb
Differential Revision: https://reviews.facebook.net/D37443
c815351038