On Tue, Jan 3, 2017 at 11:16 AM, Simon Riggs <si...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote: > On 3 January 2017 at 15:44, Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Yeah. I don't think there's any way to get around the fact that there >> will be bigger latency spikes in some cases with larger WAL files. > > One way would be for the WALwriter to zerofill new files ahead of > time, thus avoiding the latency spike.
Sure, we could do that. I think it's an independent improvement, though: it is beneficial with or without this patch. >> For example, in a quick test on my laptop, >> zero-filling a 16 megabyte file using "dd if=/dev/zero of=x bs=8k >> count=2048" takes about 11 milliseconds, and zero-filling a 64 >> megabyte file with a count of 8192 increases the time to almost 50 >> milliseconds. That's something, but I wouldn't rate it as concerning. > > I would rate that as concerning, especially if we allow much larger sizes. I don't really understand the concern. If we allow large sizes but they are not the default, people can make a throughput-vs-latency trade-off when chosing a value for their installation. Those kind of trade-offs are common and unavoidable. If we raise the default, then it's more of a concern, but I'm not sure those numbers are big enough to worry about. I'm not sure how to decide which numbers are big enough to worry about, either. I guess we need some test results showing what happens with this patch in the real world before we go further. I agree that there's a possible downside to raising the segment size, but my suspicion is that the results are going to be better, not worse, because of reducing the number of end-of-segment fsyncs. There's no point worrying too much about how we're going to mitigate the negative impact until we know for sure that there is one. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers