On Mon, 2003-11-03 at 09:38, Tom Lane wrote: > Neil Conway <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > Given a Relation and an advice, this would: > > (a) propagate the advice for this relation to all the open FDs for the > > relation > > "All"? You cannot affect the FDs being used by other backends.
Sorry, I meant just the FDs opened by this backend. > It's fairly unclear to me what the posix_fadvise function is really > going to do for files that are being accessed by multiple processes. In a thread on lkml[1], Andrew Morton comments: Note that it applies to a file descriptor. If posix_fadvise(FADV_DONTNEED) is called against a file descriptor, and someone else has an fd open against the same file, that other user gets their foot shot off. That's OK. I would imagine that by "getting their foot" shot off, Andrew is saying that FADV_DONTNEED by one process affects any other processes accessing the same file via a different FD. If I'm misunderstanding what's going on here, please let me know. > For instance, is there any value in setting POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED on a > WAL file, given that every other backend is going to have that same > file open? My understanding is that yes, there is value in doing this, for the reasons mentioned above. > A related problem is that the smgr uses the same FD to access the same > relation no matter how many scans are in progress. Interesting ... I'll have to think some more about this. Thanks for the suggestions and comments. -Neil [1] - http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0203.2/0361.html The rest of the thread includes an interesting discussion -- I recommend reading it. The lkml folks actually speculate about what we (OSS DBMS developers) would find useful in fadvise(), amusingly enough... The thread starts here: http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0203.2/0230.html Finally, Andrew Morton provides some more clarification on what happens when multiple processes are accessing a file that is fadvise()'d: http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0203.2/0476.html ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster