On Sat, 12 Jul 2008, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote:

At 2008-07-12 00:52:42 +0100, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

The later versions of mine had a GUC named effective_spindle_count
which I think is nicely abstracted away from the implementation
details.

Yes, that does sound much better. (The patch I read had a
preread_pages_bitmapscan variable instead.)

This patch does need a bit of general care in a couple of areas. The reviewing game plan I'm working through goes like this:

1) Update the original fadvise test program Greg Stark wrote to be a bit easier to use for testing general compatibility of this approach. I want to collect some data from at least two Linux and Solaris systems with different disk setups.

2) Check out effective_spindle_count and see if it looks like a reasonable way to tune this feature. If so, will probably need to merge that in to Zoltan's version of the patch. May need some other cleanup in that patch set as well--I'm not sure that closed XLOG patch that got pushed into here as well is really helpful for example.

3) Generate a sequential scan test program aimed to hobble the Linux kernel in the way Zoltan described as motivation for his work. I'm working with Jeff Davis this week to try and repurpose some of his syncronized scan test programs to handle this while we're both in the same place for a bit.

4) Generate a bitmap scan test program to check the original patch.

5) If the performance results look useful and consistant, then move toward cleaning up broader compatibility issues like the segfault concerns Zoltan mentioned.

Going to take a while to work through all that, but performance patches with platform-specific benefit are always painful like this.

--
* Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

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