On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Bruce Momjian wrote: > Hans-Jürgen Schönig wrote: > > Did anybody think about threaded sorting so far? > > Assume an SMP machine. In the case of building an index or in the case > > of sorting a lot of data there is just one backend working. Therefore > > just one CPU is used. > > What about starting a thread for every temporary file being created? > > This way CREATE INDEX could use many CPUs. > > Maybe this is worth thinking about because it will speed up huge > > databases and enterprise level computing. > > We haven't thought about it yet because there are too many buggy thread > implementations. We are probably just now getting to a point where we > can consider it. However, lots of databases have moved to threads for > all sorts of things and ended up with a royal mess of code. Threads > can only improve things in a few areas of the backend so it would be > nice if we could limit the exposure to threads to those areas; sorting > could certainly be one of them, but frankly, I think disk I/O is our > limiting factore there. I would be interested to see some tests that > showed otherwise.
Wouldn't the type of disk subsystem really make a big difference here? With a couple of U160 cards and a dozen 15krpm hard drives, I would imagine I/O would no longer be as much of an issue as a single drive system would be. It seems like sometimes we consider these issues more from the one or two SCSI drives perspective insted of the big box o drives perspective. ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])