On Fri, 4 Jul 2008, Simon Riggs wrote:
No action on this seen since last commitfest, but I think we should do something with it, rather than just ignore it.
Just no action worth reporting yet. Over the weekend I finally reached the point where I've got a system that should be capable of independently replicating the results improvement setup here, and I've started performance testing of the patch. Getting useful checkpoint test results from pgbench is really a pain.
Sorting by file might have inadvertently shown benefit at the tablespace level on a larger server with spread out data whereas on Tom's test system I would guess just a single tablespace was used.
I doubt this has anything to do with it, only because the pgbench schema doesn't split into tablespaces usefully. Almost all of the real action is on a single table, accounts.
My suspicion is that sorting only benefits in situations where you have a disk controller with a significant amount of RAM on it, but the server RAM is much larger. In that case the sorting horizon of the controller itself is smaller than what the server can do, and the sorting makes it less likely you'll end up with the controller filled with unsorted stuff that takes a long time to clear.
In Tom's test, there's probably only 8 or 16MB worth of cache on the disk itself, so you can't get a large backlog of unsorted writes clogging the write pipeline. But most server systems have 256MB or more of RAM there, and if you get that filled with seek-heavy writes (which might only clear at a couple of MB a second) the delay for that cache to empty can be considerable.
That said, I've got a 256MB controller here and have a very similar disk setup to the one postiive results were reported on, but so far I don't see any significant difference after applying the sorted writes patch.
-- * Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD -- Sent via pgsql-patches mailing list (pgsql-patches@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-patches
