Re: big select is resulting in a large amount of disk writing by kjournald

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Greg Smith wrote:
Joseph S wrote:
Greg Smith wrote:
Joseph S wrote:
So I run "select count(*) from large_table" and I see in xosview a solid block of write activity. Runtime is 28125.644 ms for the first run. The second run does not show a block of write activity and takes 3327.441 ms
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Hint_Bits


Hmm. A large select results in a lot of writes? This seems broken. And if we are setting these hint bits then what do we need VACUUM for? Is there any way to tune this behavior? Is there any way to get stats on how many rows/pages would need hint bits set?
Basically, the idea is that if you're pulling a page in for something else that requires you to compute the hint bits, just do it now so VACUUM doesn't have to later, while you're in there anyway. Why make VACUUM do the work later if you're doing part of it now anyway? If you

Then why not do all the work the VACUUM does?  What does VACUUM do anyway?

reorganize your test to VACUUM first *before* running the "select (*) from...", you'll discover the writes during SELECT go away. You're running into the worst-case behavior. For example, if you inserted a bunch of things more slowly, you might discover that autovacuum would do this cleanup before you even got to looking at the data.

I think autovacuum did hit these tables after slony copied them (I remember seeing them running). Would the hint bits be set during an reindex? For example the indexing slony does after the initial copy? I'm not sure if slony commits the transaction before it does the reindex. It probably doesn't.


downsides. This situation shows up a lot when you're benchmarking things, but not as much in the real world, so it's hard to justify improving.


Actually I think I have been running into this situation. There were many reports that ran much faster the second time around than the first and I assumed it was just because the data was in memory cache. Now I'm thinking I was running into this.

--
Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance

[Postgresql General]     [Postgresql PHP]     [PHP Users]     [PHP Home]     [PHP on Windows]     [Kernel Newbies]     [PHP Classes]     [PHP Books]     [PHP Databases]     [Yosemite]

  Powered by Linux