Re: Shared buffers, db transactions commited, and write IO on Solaris

[Erik Jones <erik@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mar 30, 2007, at 10:05 AM, Kenneth Marshall wrote:

On Fri, Mar 30, 2007 at 04:25:16PM +0200, Dimitri wrote:

The problem is while your goal is to commit as fast as possible - it's

pity to vast I/O operation speed just keeping common block size...

Let's say if your transaction modification entering into 512K - you'll

be able to write much more 512K blocks per second rather 8K per second

(for the same amount of data)... Even we rewrite probably several

times the same block with incoming transactions - it still costs on

traffic, and we will process slower even H/W can do better. Don't

think it's good, no? ;)

Rgds,

-Dimitri

With block sizes you are always trading off overhead versus space

efficiency. Most OS write only in 4k/8k to the underlying hardware

regardless of the size of the write you issue. Issuing 16 512byte

writes has much more overhead than 1 8k write. On the light transaction

end, there is no real benefit to a small write and it will slow

performance for high throughput environments. It would be better to,

and I think that someone is looking into, batching I/O.

Ken

True, and really, considering that data is only written to disk by the bgwriter and at checkpoints, writes are already somewhat batched.  Also, Dimitri, I feel I should backtrack a little and point out that it is possible to have postgres write in 512byte blocks (at least for UFS which is what's in my head right now) if you set the systems logical block size to 4K and fragment size to 512 bytes and then set postgres's BLCKSZ to 512bytes.  However, as Ken has just pointed out, what you gain in space efficiency you lose in performance so if you're working with a high traffic database this wouldn't be a good idea.

erik jones <erik@xxxxxxxxxx>

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