Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
Greg, Gregory Stark wrote: I don't think DTrace is overkill either. The programmatic interface is undocumented (but I've gotten Sun people to admit it exists -- I just have to reverse engineer it from the existing code samples) but should be more or less exactly what we need. You probably know this already. There are existing commands that use the programmatic interface and would provide a good starting point. Here are a couple: http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/lockstat/lockstat.c http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/cmd/dtrace/dtrace.c One of my colleagues is in the process of putting a tutorial together for how to do this, so if you decided to pursue this approach and need assistance, please let me know. Regards, Robert ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives? http://archives.postgresql.org
Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
Decibel! [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Also, has anyone looked into adding a class of system calls that would actually tell us if the kernel issued physical IO? I find it hard to believe that other RDBMSes wouldn't like to have that info... Yeah, I think that's called DTrace -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Ask me about EnterpriseDB's 24x7 Postgres support! ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
Decibel! [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: When a read() call returns, surely the kernel knows whether it actually issued a physical read request to satisfy that. I don't see any reason why you couldn't have a version of read() that returns that information. I also rather doubt that we're the only userland software that would make use of that. I'm told this exists on Windows for the async interface. But AFAIK it doesn't on Unix. The visibility into things like this is what makes DTrace so remarkable. I think there aren't many userland software interested in this. The only two cases I can think of are databases -- which use direct I/O partly because of this issue -- and real-time software like multimedia software -- which use aren't so much interested in measuring it as forcing things to be preloaded with stuff like posix_fadvise() or mlock(). I don't think DTrace is overkill either. The programmatic interface is undocumented (but I've gotten Sun people to admit it exists -- I just have to reverse engineer it from the existing code samples) but should be more or less exactly what we need. But the lowest-common-denominator of just timing read() and seeing if it took long enough to involve either a context switch or sleeping on physical i/o should be a pretty close approximation. The case where it would be least accurate is when most or all of the data is actually in the cache. Then even with a low false-positive rate detecting cache misses it'll still dominate the true near-zero rate of cache misses. We could mitigate that somewhat by describing it in the plan as something like ... (... I/O fast=nnn slow=nnn) instead of the more descriptive physical and logical -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Ask me about EnterpriseDB's 24x7 Postgres support! ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 2: Don't 'kill -9' the postmaster
Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
On Dec 14, 2007, at 11:10 PM, Neil Conway wrote: But it occurred to me just now that the hardware instruction counter available on just about every platform would be good enough for a heuristic guess at whether the read(2) was cached. I'm skeptical that this would be reliable enough to be very useful, especially in the face of concurrent, unpredictable system activity on a busy system. I agree that it would be useful information, though. Perhaps a useful first step would be to teach EXPLAIN ANALYZE to report the number of logical and physical I/Os from Postgres' perspective (i.e. physical I/O just means we need to go to the kernel). *watches hands wave* If we assume that what we *really* want to see the difference of is a cache IO vs one that truly hits a platter, I don't see how you could come up with enough variation to account for that. Unless you're super lucky and the sector you need is just about to hit the head when you issue the request, you're going to have a delay measured in milliseconds. 1ms on a modern CPU is over 100,000 cycles. That's a lot of instructions... Someone want to throw together some code that actually measures this? Maybe something that keeps a histogram of how many instructions take place per I/O request? If it turns out that counters do vary too much between CPUs, there might be ways that we can account for that. Also, has anyone looked into adding a class of system calls that would actually tell us if the kernel issued physical IO? I find it hard to believe that other RDBMSes wouldn't like to have that info... -- Decibel!, aka Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect [EMAIL PROTECTED] Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828 smime.p7s Description: S/MIME cryptographic signature
Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
On Mon, 17 Dec 2007, Decibel! wrote: Someone want to throw together some code that actually measures this? Maybe something that keeps a histogram of how many instructions take place per I/O request? If it turns out that counters do vary too much between CPUs, there might be ways that we can account for that. I'd expect the easiest way to do a proof of concept here would be to use the Linux oprofile tool. That's already abstracted away the differences in hardware counters and provides a relatively simple interface to collect the data without getting bogged down with implementation there. Starting from scratch, going right to the hardware counters and building from there, is a big project--they've been hacking on oprofile for almost six years now and still aren't suggesting it's release quality yet. -- * Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match
Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
On 12/17/07, Decibel! [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Also, has anyone looked into adding a class of system calls that would actually tell us if the kernel issued physical IO? I find it hard to believe that other RDBMSes wouldn't like to have that info... Non-blocking style interfaces can help here. On Windows, for instance, a read returns data at the call site if it was satisfied by cache, instead of invoking the asynchronous notification. ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq
Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
On Dec 16, 2007 1:03 AM, Heikki Linnakangas [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Gokulakannan Somasundaram wrote: I was going to say that I'm really only interested in physical I/O. Logical I/O which is satisfied by the kernel cache is only marginally interesting and buffer fetches from Postgres's shared buffer is entirely uninteresting from the point of view of trying to figure out what is slowing down a query. Ok the Physical I/Os are already visible, if you enable log_statement_stats. I think you missed the point. What log_statement_stats shows are not physical I/Os, they're read() system calls. Unfortunately there's no direct way to tell if a read() is satisfied from OS cache or not. Greg's suggestion was about how to do that. Oh OK. Thanks for clarifying.. -- Thanks, Gokul. CertoSQL Project, Allied Solution Group. (www.alliedgroups.com)
Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
Gokulakannan Somasundaram [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Hi, I already made a discussion about it. We can view the Logical I/Os. If we enable the log_statement_stats in the conf file and apply the following patch, it is possible. But putting it in Explain analyze makes more sense to me. I was going to say that I'm really only interested in physical I/O. Logical I/O which is satisfied by the kernel cache is only marginally interesting and buffer fetches from Postgres's shared buffer is entirely uninteresting from the point of view of trying to figure out what is slowing down a query. However I suppose that's not true. There are other reasons why buffer fetches could be interesting. In particular I imagine when users post explain analyzes it would give us a good idea of whether their tables or bloated or their tuples are extremely wide (in cases where the planner gets it wrong). But I do think that showing logical I/Os without even an heuristic based measurement of actual physical i/o is pretty useless. It will make people think they want to grow their shared buffers to cover all of memory. -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Ask me about EnterpriseDB's PostGIS support! ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
I was going to say that I'm really only interested in physical I/O. Logical I/O which is satisfied by the kernel cache is only marginally interesting and buffer fetches from Postgres's shared buffer is entirely uninteresting from the point of view of trying to figure out what is slowing down a query. Ok the Physical I/Os are already visible, if you enable log_statement_stats. Again i accept that it would be more helpful, if it gets displayed with Explain Analyze. However I suppose that's not true. There are other reasons why buffer fetches could be interesting. In particular I imagine when users post explain analyzes it would give us a good idea of whether their tables or bloated or their tuples are extremely wide (in cases where the planner gets it wrong). I have used it a lot for query tuning. If we re-write a query in such a way, the logical reads will come down, then it implies lesser physical reads in production. I think you would accept that there are some ways in which the query can be re-written only by humans and not by the optimizer. When we do that, instead of looking at the explain analyze time, it makes more sense for me to look at the logical reads But I do think that showing logical I/Os without even an heuristic based measurement of actual physical i/o is pretty useless. It will make people think they want to grow their shared buffers to cover all of memory. I just want to clarify that we should display both Logical reads and physical reads together. But increasing the shared buffer by looking at the performance of a query doesn't seem to be a good idea. But people should be aware that Logical reads is not for shared buffer management. -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com Ask me about EnterpriseDB's PostGIS support! -- Thanks, Gokul. CertoSQL Project, Allied Solution Group. (www.alliedgroups.com)
Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
Gokulakannan Somasundaram wrote: I was going to say that I'm really only interested in physical I/O. Logical I/O which is satisfied by the kernel cache is only marginally interesting and buffer fetches from Postgres's shared buffer is entirely uninteresting from the point of view of trying to figure out what is slowing down a query. Ok the Physical I/Os are already visible, if you enable log_statement_stats. I think you missed the point. What log_statement_stats shows are not physical I/Os, they're read() system calls. Unfortunately there's no direct way to tell if a read() is satisfied from OS cache or not. Greg's suggestion was about how to do that. -- Heikki Linnakangas EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com ---(end of broadcast)--- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
On Fri, 2007-12-14 at 15:47 +, Gregory Stark wrote:
I've wanted for a long time to have EXPLAIN ANALYZE output per-node I/O usage.
This would be especially useful if we could distinguish hardware versus
logical I/O though. And I always thought that would be very hard.
My thought in the past was that would could do it on Solaris by having
Postgres use DTrace directly via its (undocumented but existing) programmatic
interface.
For other operating systems it was tempting to suggest just timing the read(2)
call to see if it took too long to be a logical operation. The problem there
is that gettimeofday would impose far too much overhead to make that practical
(or even be precise enough to work properly).
But it occurred to me just now that the hardware instruction counter available
on just about every platform would be good enough for a heuristic guess at
whether the read(2) was cached.
I'm skeptical that this would be reliable enough to be very useful,
especially in the face of concurrent, unpredictable system activity on a
busy system. I agree that it would be useful information, though.
Perhaps a useful first step would be to teach EXPLAIN ANALYZE to report
the number of logical and physical I/Os from Postgres' perspective (i.e.
physical I/O just means we need to go to the kernel).
The problem generally with using the hardware
instruction counter is that it's not necessarily in sync between processors
and might therefore run backwards or skip time forwards. This is a problem for
profiling but if all we care about is a boolean guess at whether the request
was satisfied quickly from cache then any such skipping forward or backward
would represent a context switch which we could just toss in the hardware i/o
bucket. It doesn't matter exactly how long the hardware i/o took, only that
there was one.
To that end I would love to see something like:
QUERY PLAN
-
Bitmap Heap Scan on h (cost=8.52..16.45 rows=2 width=512) (actual
time=78.926..87.708 rows=2 loops=1 logical-I/O=2 physical-I/O=1)
Recheck Cond: (i = ANY ('{100,1000}'::integer[]))
- Bitmap Index Scan on hi (cost=0.00..8.52 rows=2 width=0) (actual
time=74.539..74.539 rows=2 loops=1 logical-I/O=2 physical-I/O=2))
Index Cond: (i = ANY ('{100,1000}'::integer[]))
Total runtime: 87.820 ms
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Re: [HACKERS] EXPLAIN ANALYZE printing logical and hardware I/O per-node
Hi, I already made a discussion about it. We can view the Logical I/Os. If we enable the log_statement_stats in the conf file and apply the following patch, it is possible. But putting it in Explain analyze makes more sense to me. *** postgresql-8.3beta1/src/backend/storage/buffer/bufmgr.c Tue Sep 25 18:11:48 2007 --- postgresql-8.3patch/src/backend/storage/buffer/bufmgr.c Fri Oct 19 23:18:36 2007 *** *** 1470,1477 localhitrate = (float) LocalBufferHitCount *100.0 / ReadLocalBufferCount; appendStringInfo(str, ! !\tShared blocks: %10ld read, %10ld written, buffer hit rate = %.2f%%\n, ! ReadBufferCount - BufferHitCount, BufferFlushCount, hitrate); appendStringInfo(str, !\tLocal blocks: %10ld read, %10ld written, buffer hit rate = %.2f%%\n, ReadLocalBufferCount - LocalBufferHitCount, LocalBufferFlushCount, localhitrate); --- 1470,1477 localhitrate = (float) LocalBufferHitCount *100.0 / ReadLocalBufferCount; appendStringInfo(str, ! !\tShared blocks: %10ld Logical Reads, %10ld Physical Reads, %10ld written, buffer hit rate = %.2f%%\n, ! ReadBufferCount, ReadBufferCount - BufferHitCount, BufferFlushCount, hitrate); appendStringInfo(str, !\tLocal blocks: %10ld read, %10ld written, buffer hit rate = %.2f%%\n, ReadLocalBufferCount - LocalBufferHitCount, LocalBufferFlushCount, localhitrate); -- Thanks, Gokul. CertoSQL Project, Allied Solution Group. (www.alliedgroups.com)
