Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Yeah, this is about what I was afraid of: if you're actually fsyncing > then you get at best one commit per disk revolution, and the negotiation > with the OS is down in the noise.
If we disable writeback-cache and use open_sync, the per-page writing behavior in WAL module will show up as bad result. O_DIRECT is similar to O_DSYNC (at least on linux), so that the benefit of it will disappear behind the slow disk revolution. In the current source, WAL is written as: for (i = 0; i < N; i++) { write(&buffers[i], BLCKSZ); } Is this intentional? Can we rewrite it as follows? write(&buffers[0], N * BLCKSZ); In order to achieve it, I wrote a 'gather-write' patch (xlog.gw.diff). Aside from this, I'll also send the fixed direct io patch (xlog.dio.diff). These two patches are independent, so they can be applied either or both. I tested them on my machine and the results as follows. It shows that direct-io and gather-write is the best choice when writeback-cache is off. Are these two patches worth trying if they are used together? | writeback | fsync= | fdata | open_ | fsync_ | open_ patch | cache | false | sync | sync | direct | direct ------------+-----------+--------+-------+-------+--------+--------- direct io | off | 124.2 | 105.7 | 48.3 | 48.3 | 48.2 direct io | on | 129.1 | 112.3 | 114.1 | 142.9 | 144.5 gather-write| off | 124.3 | 108.7 | 105.4 | (N/A) | (N/A) both | off | 131.5 | 115.5 | 114.4 | 145.4 | 145.2 - 20runs * pgbench -s 100 -c 50 -t 200 - with tuning (wal_buffers=64, commit_delay=500, checkpoint_segments=8) - using 2 ATA disks: - hda(reiserfs) includes system and wal. - hdc(jfs) includes database files. writeback-cache is always on. --- ITAGAKI Takahiro NTT Cyber Space Laboratories
xlog.dio.diff
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xlog.gw.diff
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