Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com> writes: > Although I can point out that you left out the fact that the disk needs to do > a seek to find the beginning of the seq scan area, and even then some file > fragmentation is possible. Finally, I've never seen PostgreSQL manage more > than 70% of the maximum read rate, and in most cases more like 30%.
Hm. I just did a quick test. It wasn't really long enough to get a good estimate, but it seemed to reach about 30MB/s on this drive that's only capable of 40-50MB/s depending on the location on the platters. That's true though, some of my calculated 25% random seeks could be caused by fragmentation. But it seems like that would be a small part. > > So what's going on with the empirically derived value of 4? > > It's not empirically derived; it's a value we plug into an > internal-to-postgresql formula. I thought Tom said he got the value by doing empirical tests. -- greg ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 2: you can get off all lists at once with the unregister command (send "unregister YourEmailAddressHere" to [EMAIL PROTECTED])