Bruce Momjian wrote:
Ron Mayer wrote:
Even more often on systems I see these days, "spindles"
is an implementation detail that the DBA has no way to know
what the correct value is.

For example, on our sites hosted with Amazon's compute cloud (a great
place to host web sites), I know nothing about spindles, but know
about Amazon Elastic Block Store[2]'s and Instance Store's[1].   I
have some specs and are able to run benchmarks on them; but couldn't
guess how many spindles my X% of the N-disk device that corresponds
to.  For another example, some of our salesguys with SSD drives
have 0 spindles on their demo machines.

I'd rather a parameter that expressed things more in terms of
measurable quantities -- perhaps seeks/second?  perhaps
random-access/sequential-access times?

I assume SAN users might not know the number of spindles either.

Yeah. Nevertheless I like the way effective_spindle_count works, as opposed to an unintuitive "number of blocks to prefetch" (assuming the formula we use to turn the former into latter works). Perhaps we should keep the meaning the same, but call it "effective_io_concurrency"? Something that conveys the idea of "how many simultaneous I/O requests the I/O subsystem can handle", without referring to any specific technology. That concept applies to SANs and RAM drives as well.

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

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