On 08/07/2014 10:10 AM, Mitsumasa KONDO wrote:
2014-08-07 13:47 GMT+09:00 Fujii Masao <masao.fu...@gmail.com>:

On Thu, Aug 7, 2014 at 3:59 AM, Heikki Linnakangas
<hlinnakan...@vmware.com> wrote:
On 08/06/2014 08:39 PM, Fujii Masao wrote:
The WAL files that pg_receivexlog writes will not be re-read soon
basically,
so we can advise the OS to release any cached pages when WAL file is
closed. I feel inclined to change pg_receivexlog that way. Thought?


-1. The OS should be smart enough to not thrash the cache by files that
are
written sequentially and never read.

OS's buffer strategy is optimized for general situation. Do you forget OS
hackers discussion last a half of year?

Yep, the OS should be so smart, but I'm not sure if it actually is. Maybe
not,
so I was thinking that posix_fadvise is called when the server closes WAL
file.

That's right.

Well, I'd like to hear someone from the field complaining that pg_receivexlog is thrashing the cache and thus reducing the performance of some other process. Or a least a synthetic test case that demonstrates that happening.

By the way, does pg_receivexlog process have fsync() in every WAL commit?

It fsync's each file after finishing to write it. Ie. each WAL file is fsync'd once.

If yes, I think that we need no or less fsync() option for the better
performance. It is general in NOSQL storages.
If no, we need fsync() option for more getting reliability and data
integrarity.

Hmm. An fsync=off style option might make sense, although I doubt the one fsync at end of file is causing a performance problem for anyone in practice. Haven't heard any complaints, anyway.

An option to fsync after every commit record might make sense if you use pg_receivexlog with synchronous replication. Doing that would require parsing the WAL, though, to see where the commit records are. But then again, the fsync's wouldn't need to correspond to commit records. We could fsync just before we go to sleep to wait for more WAL to be received.

- Heikki



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