All,

I was looking at these IOZone results for some NAS hardware and thinking about index scans:

Children see throughput for  6 readers          =   72270.04 KB/sec
Parent sees throughput for  6 readers           =   72269.06 KB/sec
Min throughput per process                      =   11686.53 KB/sec
Max throughput per process                      =   12506.65 KB/sec
Avg throughput per process                      =   12045.01 KB/sec
Min xfer                                        = 3919344.00 KB

Children see throughput for 6 reverse readers   =   17313.57 KB/sec
Parent sees throughput for 6 reverse readers    =   17313.52 KB/sec
Min throughput per process                      =    2569.21 KB/sec
Max throughput per process                      =    3101.18 KB/sec
Avg throughput per process                      =    2885.60 KB/sec
Min xfer                                        = 3474840.00 KB

Now, what that says to me is that for this system reverse sequential reads are 1/4 the speed of forwards reads. And from my testing elsewhere, that seems fairly typical of disk systems in general.

Now, while index scans (for indexes on disk) aren't 100% sequential reads, it seems like we should be increasing (substantially) the estimated cost of reverse index scans if the index is likely to be on disk. No?

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
www.pgexperts.com

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