The delay patch worked so well, I couldn't resist asking if a similar patch could be added for COPY command (pg_dump). It's just an extension of the same idea. On a large DB, backups can take very long while consuming a lot of IO slowing down other select and write operations. We operate on a backup window during low traffic period at night. It'll be nice to be able to run pg_dump *anytime* and no longer need to worry about the backup window. Backups will take longer to run, but like in the case of the VACUUM, it's a win for many people to be able to let it run in the background through the whole day. The delay should be optional and defaults to zero so those who wish to backup immediately can still do it. The way I see it, routine backups and vacuums should be ubiquitous once properly configured.
Regards, Stephen "Tom Lane" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Jan Wieck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > I am currently looking at implementing ARC as a replacement strategy. I > > don't have anything that works yet, so I can't really tell what the > > result would be and it might turn out that we want both features. > > It's likely that we would. As someone (you?) already pointed out, > VACUUM has bad side-effects both in terms of cache flushing and in > terms of sheer I/O load. Those effects require different fixes AFAICS. > > One thing that bothers me here is that I don't see how adjusting our > own buffer replacement strategy is going to do much of anything when > we cannot control the kernel's buffer replacement strategy. To get any > real traction we'd have to go back to the "take over most of RAM for > shared buffers" approach, which we already know to have a bunch of > severe disadvantages. > > regards, tom lane > > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- > TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster > ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
