On Sat, 2012-05-26 at 15:14 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > 3. Having now spent a good deal of time poking at this, I think that the > syncscan logic is in need of more tuning, and I am wondering whether we > should even have it turned on by default. It appears to be totally > useless for fully-cached-in-RAM scenarios, even if most of the relation > is out in kernel buffers rather than in shared buffers. The best case > I saw was less than 2X speedup compared to N-times-the-single-client > case, and that wasn't very reproducible, and it didn't happen at all > unless I hacked BAS_BULKREAD mode to use a ring buffer size many times > larger than the current 256K setting (otherwise the timing requirements > are too tight for multiple backends to stay in sync --- a seqscan can > blow through that much data in a fraction of a millisecond these days, > if it's reading from kernel buffers). The current tuning may be all > right for cases where you're actually reading from spinning rust, but > that seems to be a decreasing fraction of real-world use cases.
Do you mean that the best case you saw ever was 2X, or the best case when the table is mostly in kernel buffers was 2X? I clearly saw better than 2X when the table was on disk, so if you aren't, we should investigate. One thing we could do is drive the threshold from effective_cache_size rather than shared_buffers, which was discussed during 8.3 development. Regards, Jeff Davis -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers