17.08.2016, 22:11, Tom Lane kirjoitti:
Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes:
I don't understand why you think this would create non-trivial
portability issues.

The patch as submitted breaks entirely on platforms without pread/pwrite.
Yes, we can add a configure test and some shim functions to fix that,
but the argument that it makes the code shorter will get a lot weaker
once we do.

I posted an updated patch which just calls lseek + read/write, the code's still a lot shorter.

I agree that adding such functions is pretty trivial, but there are
reasons to think there are other hazards that are less trivial:

First, a self-contained shim function will necessarily do an lseek every
time, which means performance will get *worse* not better on non-pread
platforms.  And yes, the existing logic to avoid lseeks fires often enough
to be worthwhile, particularly in seqscans.

This will only regress on platforms without pread. The only relevant such platform appears to be Windows which has equivalent APIs.

FWIW, I ran the same pgbench benchmarks on my Linux system where I always used lseek() + read/write instead of pread and pwrite - they ran slightly faster than the previous code which saved seek positions, but I suppose a workload with lots of seqscans could be slower.

Unfortunately I didn't save the actual numbers anywhere, but I can rerun the benchmarks if you're interested. The numbers were pretty stable across multiple runs.

Second, I wonder whether this will break any kernel's readahead detection.
I wouldn't be too surprised if successive reads (not preads) without
intervening lseeks are needed to trigger readahead on at least some
platforms.  So there's a potential, both on platforms with pread and those
without, for this to completely destroy seqscan performance, with
penalties very far exceeding what we might save by avoiding some kernel
calls.

At least Linux and FreeBSD don't seem to care how and why you read pages, they'll do readahead regardless of the way you read files and extend the readahead once you access previously readahead pages. They disable readahead only if fadvise(POSIX_FADV_RANDOM) has been used.

I'd expect any kernel that implements mmap to also implement readahead based on page usage rather than than the seek position. Do you know of a kernel that would actually use the seek position for readahead?

I'd be more excited about this if the claimed improvement were more than
1.5%, but you know as well as I do that that's barely above the noise
floor for most performance measurements.  I'm left wondering why bother,
and why take any risk of de-optimizing on some platforms.

I think it makes sense to try to optimize for the platforms that people actually use for performance critical workloads, especially if it also allows us to simplify the code and remove more lines than we add. It's nice if the software still works on legacy platforms, but I don't think we should be concerned about a hypothetical performance impact on platforms no one uses in production anymore.

/ Oskari


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