Simon Riggs wrote:
On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 21:50 -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
Simon Riggs wrote:

Presumably we would not store an FSM for small tables? On the basis that
the purpose of the FSM is to save on pointless I/O there must be a size
of table below which an FSM is just overhead.
Hmm, do you mean that we would open and verify every page of a small
relation until we find one with free space?  That doesn't sound very
good.

I was trying to guess at Heikki's reason for saying the FSM should be in
a separate file. If we have one extra file per table that seems like a
huge number of additional files, with space and fsync implications.

You need the same amount of space either way. Well, I guess additional files consume some space in the filesystem directory structures. I doubt that matters.

You do need more fsyncs, and more overhead when creating/dropping relations, to create/unlink the FSM files. I don't know how significant that is.

--
  Heikki Linnakangas
  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com

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