Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakan...@enterprisedb.com> writes: > Tom Lane wrote: >> I'm not convinced that WAL segment boundaries are particularly relevant >> to this. The unit of flushing is an 8K page, not a segment.
> We fsync() the old WAL segment every time we switch to a new WAL > segment. That's what I meant by "flush". > If the walwriter is keeping up, it will fsync() the WAL more often, but > 16MB is the maximum distance between fsync()s. I'm still not convinced --- to my mind the issue is not whether fsyncs happen but whether the COPY process has to wait for 'em, and I don't think that segment boundaries directly affect that. I'd still be interested to see similar measurements done with different wal_buffer settings. However, in the interests of getting this resolved in time for 8.4.0, I propose that we just settle on 16MB as the bulkwrite ring buffer size. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that a larger size will make for a significant improvement, and we shouldn't allow COPY to trash a bigger fraction of the arena than it really has to. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers