Re: [PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
On Sun, 20 Apr 2008, James Mansion wrote: Are you suggesting that the disk subsystem has already decided on its strategy for a set of seeks and writes and will not insert new instructions into an existing elevator plan until it is completed and it looks at the new requests? No, just that each component only gets to sort across what it sees, and because of that the sorting horizon may not be optimized the same way depending on how writes are sent. Let me try to construct a credible example of this elusive phenomenon: -We have a server with lots of RAM -The disk controller cache has 256MB of cache -We have 512MB of data to write that's spread randomly across the database disk. Case 1: Write early Let's say the background writer writes a sample of 1/2 the data right now in anticipation of needing those buffers for something else soon. It's now in the controller's cache and sorted already. The controller is working on it. Presume it starts at the beginning of the disk and works its way toward the end, seeking past gaps in between as needed. The checkpoint hits just after that happens. The remaining 256MB gets dumped into the OS buffer cache. This gets elevator sorted by the OS, which will now write it out to the card in sorted order, beginning to end. But writes to the controller will block because most of the cache is filled, so they trickle in as data writes are completed and the cache gets space. Let's presume they're all ignored, because the drive is working toward the end and these are closer to the beginning than the ones it's working on. Now the disk is near the end of its logical space, and there's a cache full of new dirty checkpoint data. But the OS has finished spooling all its dirty stuff into the cache so the checkpoint is over. During that checkpoint the disk has to seek enough to cover the full logical length of the volume. The controller will continue merrily writing now until its cache clears again, moving from the end of the disk back to the beginning again. Case 2: Delayed writes, no background writer use The checkpoint hits. 512MB of data gets dumped into the OS cache. It sorts and feeds that in sorted order into the cache. Drive starts at the beginning and works it way through everything. By the time it's finished seeking its way across half the disk, the OS is now unblocked becuase the remaining data is in the cache. Can you see how in this second case, it may very well be that the checkpoint finishes *faster* because we waited longer to start writing? Because the OS has a much larger elevator sorting capacity than the disk controller, leaving data in RAM and waiting until there's more of it queued up there has approximately halved the number/size of seeks involved before the controller can say it's absorbed all the writes. This sounds a bit tenuous at best - almost to the point of being a bug. Do you believe this is universal? Of course not, or the background writer would be turned off by default. There are occasional reports where it just gets in the way, typically in ones where the controller has its own cache and there's a bad interaction there. This is not unique to this situation, so in that sense this class of problems is universal. There's all kinds of operating sytems configurations that are tuned to delay writing in hopes of making those writes more efficient, because the OS usually has a much larger capacity for buffering pages to optimize what's going to happen than the downstream controller/disk caches do. Once you've filled a downstream cache, you may not be able to influence what that device executing those requests does anymore until that cache clears. Note that the worst-case situation here actually gets worse in some respects the larger the downstream cache is, because there's that much more data you have to wait to clear before you can necessarily influence what the disks are doing if you've made a bad choice in what you asked it to write early. If the disk head is too far away from where you want to write or read to now, you can be in for quite a wait before it gets back your way if the filled cache is large. -- * Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
Re: [PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
Greg Smith wrote: If you write a giant block of writes, those tend to be sorted by the OS and possibly the controller to reduce total seeks. That's a pretty efficient write and it can clear relatively fast. But if you're been trickling writes in an unstructured form and in low volume, there can be a stack of them that aren't sorted well blocking the queue from clearing. With a series of small writes, it's not that difficult to end up in a situation where a controller cache is filled with writes containing a larger seek component than you'd have gotten had you written in larger blocks that took advantage of more OS-level elevator sorting. There's actually a pending patch to try and improve this situation in regards to checkpoint writes in the queue. Seeks are so slow compared to more sequential writes that you really can end up in the counterintuitive situation that you finish faster by avoiding early writes, even in cases when the disk is the bottleneck. I'm sorry but I am somewhat unconvinced by this. I accept that by early submission the disk subsystem may end up doing more seeks and more writes in total, but when the dam breaks at the start of the checkpoint, how can it help to have _more_ data write volume and _more_ implied seeks offered up at that point? Are you suggesting that the disk subsystem has already decided on its strategy for a set of seeks and writes and will not insert new instructions into an existing elevator plan until it is completed and it looks at the new requests? This sounds a bit tenuous at best - almost to the point of being a bug. Do you believe this is universal? James -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
Re: [PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
On Thu, 17 Apr 2008, Marinos Yannikos wrote: Controller is http://www.infortrend.com/main/2_product/es_a08(12)f-g2422.asp with 2GB cache (writeback was enabled). Ah. Sometimes these fiber channel controllers can get a little weird (compared with more direct storage) when the cache gets completely filled. If you think about it, flushing 2GB out takes takes a pretty significant period amount of time even at 4Gbps, and once all the caches at every level are filled it's possible for that to turn into a bottleneck. Using the background writer more assures that the cache on the controller is going to be written to aggressively, so it may be somewhat filled already come checkpoint time. If you leave the writer off, when the checkpoint comes you're much more likely to have the full 2GB available to absorb a large block of writes. You suggested a documentation update; it would be fair to suggest that there are caching/storage setups where even the 8.3 BGW might just be getting in the way. The right thing to do there is just turn it off altogether, which should work a bit better than the exact tuning you suggested. Perhaps the background writer takes too long to find the required number of dirty pages among the 16GB shared buffers (currently), which should be mostly clean. That would only cause a minor increase in CPU usage. You certainly don't want to reduce shared_buffers for all the reasons you list. I was under the impression that wal_buffers should be kept at/above the size of tyical transactions. It doesn't have to be large enough to hold a whole transaction, just big enough that when it fills and a write is forced that write isn't trivially small (and therefore wasteful in terms of I/O size). There's a fairly good discussion of what's actually involved here at http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-advocacy/2003-02/msg00053.php ; as I suggested, I've seen and heard others report small improvements in raising from the tiny default value to the small MB range, but beyond that you're just wasting RAM that could buffer database pages instead. -- * Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
Re: [PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
Greg Smith wrote: Using the background writer more assures that the cache on the controller is going to be written to aggressively, so it may be somewhat filled already come checkpoint time. If you leave the writer off, when the checkpoint comes you're much more likely to have the full 2GB available to absorb a large block of writes. But isn't it the case that while using background writer might result in *slightly* more data to write (since data that is updated several times might actually be sent several times), the total amount of data in both cases is much the same? And if the buffer backed up in the BGW case, wouldn't it also back up (more?) if the writes are deferred? And in fact by sending earlier, the real bottleneck (the disks) could have been getting on with it and staring their IO earlier? Can you explian your reasoning a bit more? James -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
Re: [PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
On Sat, 19 Apr 2008, James Mansion wrote: But isn't it the case that while using background writer might result in *slightly* more data to write (since data that is updated several times might actually be sent several times), the total amount of data in both cases is much the same? Really depends on your workload, how many wasted writes there are. It might be significant, it might only be slight. And if the buffer backed up in the BGW case, wouldn't it also back up (more?) if the writes are deferred? And in fact by sending earlier, the real bottleneck (the disks) could have been getting on with it and staring their IO earlier? If you write a giant block of writes, those tend to be sorted by the OS and possibly the controller to reduce total seeks. That's a pretty efficient write and it can clear relatively fast. But if you're been trickling writes in an unstructured form and in low volume, there can be a stack of them that aren't sorted well blocking the queue from clearing. With a series of small writes, it's not that difficult to end up in a situation where a controller cache is filled with writes containing a larger seek component than you'd have gotten had you written in larger blocks that took advantage of more OS-level elevator sorting. There's actually a pending patch to try and improve this situation in regards to checkpoint writes in the queue. Seeks are so slow compared to more sequential writes that you really can end up in the counterintuitive situation that you finish faster by avoiding early writes, even in cases when the disk is the bottleneck. -- * Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
Re: [PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
Greg Smith schrieb: You also didn't mention what disk controller you have, or how much write cache it has (if any). 8.3.1, Controller is http://www.infortrend.com/main/2_product/es_a08(12)f-g2422.asp with 2GB cache (writeback was enabled). That's almost turning the background writer off. If that's what improved your situation, you might as well as turn it off altogether by setting all the bgwriter_lru_maxpages parameters to be 0. The combination you describe here, running very infrequently but with lru_maxpages set to its maximum, is a bit odd. Perhaps the background writer takes too long to find the required number of dirty pages among the 16GB shared buffers (currently), which should be mostly clean. We could reduce the shared buffers to a more commonly used amount (= 2GB or so) but some of our most frequently used tables are in the 8+ GB range and sequential scans are much faster with this setting (for ~, ~* etc.). Other options we have tried/used were shared_buffers between 200MB and 20GB, wal_buffers = 256MB, wal_writer_delay=5000ms ... The useful range for wal_buffers tops at around 1MB, so no need to get extreme there. wal_writer_delay shouldn't matter here unless you turned on asyncronous commit. I was under the impression that wal_buffers should be kept at/above the size of tyical transactions. We do have some large-ish ones that are time-critical. -mjy -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
[PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
Hi, to save some people a headache or two: I believe we just solved our performance problem in the following scenario: - Linux 2.6.24.4 - lots of RAM (32GB) - enough CPU power (4 cores) - disks with relatively slow random writes (SATA RAID-5 / 7 disks, 128K stripe, ext2) Our database is around 86GB, the busy parts being 20-30GB. Typical load is regular reads of all sizes (large joins, sequential scans on a 8GB table, many small selects with few rows) interspersed with writes of several 1000s rows on the busier tables by several clients. After many tests and research revolving around the Linux I/O-Schedulers (which still have some issues one should be wary about: http://lwn.net/Articles/216853/) because we saw problems when occasional (intensive) writes completely starved all I/O, we discovered that changing the default settings for the background writer seems to have solved all these problems. Performance is much better now with fsync on than it was with fsync off previously, no other configuration options had a noticeable effect on performance (or these problems rather). This helped with our configuration: bgwriter_delay = 1ms # 10-1ms between rounds bgwriter_lru_maxpages = 1000 # 0-1000 max buffers written/round Previously, our typical writes resulted in around 5-10MB/s going to disk and some reads stalling, now we are seeing typical disk I/O in the 30-60MB/s range with write load present and no noticeable problems with reads except when autovacuum's analyze is running. Other options we have tried/used were shared_buffers between 200MB and 20GB, wal_buffers = 256MB, wal_writer_delay=5000ms ... So, using this is highly recommended and I would say that the documentation does not do it justice... (and yes, I could have figured it out earlier) -mjy -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
Re: [PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Marinos Yannikos) writes: This helped with our configuration: bgwriter_delay = 1ms # 10-1ms between rounds bgwriter_lru_maxpages = 1000 # 0-1000 max buffers written/round FYI, I'd be inclined to reduce both of those numbers, as it should reduce the variability of behaviour. Rather than cleaning 1K pages every 10s, I would rather clean 100 pages every 1s, as that will have much the same effect, but spread the work more evenly. Or perhaps 10 pages every 100ms... Cut the delay *too* low and this might make the background writer, in effect, poll *too* often, and start chewing resources, but there's doubtless some sweet spot in between... -- cbbrowne,@,cbbrowne.com http://linuxdatabases.info/info/oses.html For systems, the analogue of a face-lift is to add to the control graph an edge that creates a cycle, not just an additional node. -- Alan J. Perlis -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
Re: [PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
In response to Marinos Yannikos [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Hi, to save some people a headache or two: I believe we just solved our performance problem in the following scenario: - Linux 2.6.24.4 - lots of RAM (32GB) - enough CPU power (4 cores) - disks with relatively slow random writes (SATA RAID-5 / 7 disks, 128K stripe, ext2) Our database is around 86GB, the busy parts being 20-30GB. Typical load is regular reads of all sizes (large joins, sequential scans on a 8GB table, many small selects with few rows) interspersed with writes of several 1000s rows on the busier tables by several clients. After many tests and research revolving around the Linux I/O-Schedulers (which still have some issues one should be wary about: http://lwn.net/Articles/216853/) because we saw problems when occasional (intensive) writes completely starved all I/O, we discovered that changing the default settings for the background writer seems to have solved all these problems. Performance is much better now with fsync on than it was with fsync off previously, no other configuration options had a noticeable effect on performance (or these problems rather). This helped with our configuration: bgwriter_delay = 1ms # 10-1ms between rounds bgwriter_lru_maxpages = 1000 # 0-1000 max buffers written/round What other values have you tried for this? Have you watched closely under load to ensure that you're not seeing a huge performance hit every 10s when the bgwriter kicks off? I'm with Chris -- I would be inclined to try a range of values to find a sweet spot, and I would be _very_ shocked to find that sweet spot at the values you mention. However, if that really is the demonstrable sweet spot, there may be something we all can learn. -- Bill Moran Collaborative Fusion Inc. http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: 412-422-3463x4023 -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
Re: [PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Marinos Yannikos wrote: to save some people a headache or two: I believe we just solved our performance problem in the following scenario: I was about to ask your PostgreSQL version but since I see you mention wal_writer_delay it must be 8.3. Knowing your settings for shared_buffers and checkpoint_segments in particular would make this easier to understand. You also didn't mention what disk controller you have, or how much write cache it has (if any). This helped with our configuration: bgwriter_delay = 1ms # 10-1ms between rounds bgwriter_lru_maxpages = 1000 # 0-1000 max buffers written/round The default for bgwriter_delay is 200ms = 5 passes/second. You're increasing that to 1ms means one pass every 10 seconds instead. That's almost turning the background writer off. If that's what improved your situation, you might as well as turn it off altogether by setting all the bgwriter_lru_maxpages parameters to be 0. The combination you describe here, running very infrequently but with lru_maxpages set to its maximum, is a bit odd. Other options we have tried/used were shared_buffers between 200MB and 20GB, wal_buffers = 256MB, wal_writer_delay=5000ms ... The useful range for wal_buffers tops at around 1MB, so no need to get extreme there. wal_writer_delay shouldn't matter here unless you turned on asyncronous commit. -- * Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
Re: [PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Bill Moran wrote: bgwriter_delay = 1ms # 10-1ms between rounds bgwriter_lru_maxpages = 1000 # 0-1000 max buffers written/round Have you watched closely under load to ensure that you're not seeing a huge performance hit every 10s when the bgwriter kicks off? bgwriter_lru_maxpages = 1000 means that any background writer pass can write at most 1000 pages = 8MB. Those are buffered writes going into the OS cache, which it will write out at its own pace later. That isn't going to cause a performance hit when it happens. That isn't the real mystery though--where's the RAID5 rant I was expecting from you? -- * Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
Re: [PERFORM] Background writer underemphasized ...
In response to Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED]: On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Bill Moran wrote: bgwriter_delay = 1ms # 10-1ms between rounds bgwriter_lru_maxpages = 1000 # 0-1000 max buffers written/round Have you watched closely under load to ensure that you're not seeing a huge performance hit every 10s when the bgwriter kicks off? bgwriter_lru_maxpages = 1000 means that any background writer pass can write at most 1000 pages = 8MB. Those are buffered writes going into the OS cache, which it will write out at its own pace later. That isn't going to cause a performance hit when it happens. That isn't the real mystery though--where's the RAID5 rant I was expecting from you? Oh crap ... he _is_ using RAID-5! I completely missed an opportunity to rant! blah blah blah ... RAID-5 == evile, etc ... -- Bill Moran Collaborative Fusion Inc. http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] Phone: 412-422-3463x4023 -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance
