Mark Wong <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I talked to Jan a little about this during OSCon since Linux filesystems > (ext2, ext3, etc) let you use O_DIRECT. He felt the only place where > PostgreSQL may benefit from this now, without managing its own buffer first, > would be with the log writer. I'm probably going to get this wrong, but > he thought it would be interesting to try an experiment by taking X number > of pages to be flushed, sort them (by age? where they go on disk?) and > write them out.
Hmm. Most of the time the log writer has little choice about page write order --- certainly if all your transactions are small it's not going to have any choice. I think this would mainly be equivalent to O_SYNC with the extra feature of stopping the kernel from buffering the WAL data in its own buffer cache. Which is probably useful, but I doubt it's going to make a huge difference. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 4: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster