(Sorry if this gets posted twice - our damn mail server rewrites outgoing mails 
so I had to unsubscribe and re-subscribe under a different Email address)

Hello list. I'd like to ask someone with more SQLite experience than me a 
simple question. First, some background;

Distribution: Scientific Linux 6.3
Kernel: 2.6.32-279.9.1.el6.x86_64
SQLite version: 3.6.20

We have a single process that, given some data, does some processing and writes 
it all to a single SQLite DB file. This is a write-once process. When this task 
is finished, the file itself is marked as read only (0444).

This file exists on an NFS share for multiple users to read - nothing further 
is ever written to it. The problem we're seeing is that when this DB file is 
read from (over NFS) none of the pages are cached (despite ~12GB free for page 
cache use) or at least immediately evicted. This is quite detrimental to 
performance because our resulting data files (SQLite DB files) are between 100 
to 400 MB in size. We *want* it to be cached - the whole thing. The page cache 
would do this nicely for us and allow multiple processes on the same machine to 
share that data without any complication.

I understand that SQLite implements it's own internal page cache but why, on a 
standard desktop machine, will it not use the page cache. Is there anyway of 
forcing it or bypassing the internal page cache in favour of the job that Linux 
already does? I cannot find any reference to O_DIRECT or madvise() or favdise() 
etc. in the code. The following PRAGMAs don't help either;

PRAGMA writable_schema = OFF
PRAGMA journal_mode = OFF
PRAGMA synchronous = OFF

PRAGMA cache_size = -<size of DB file in kbytes>

Obviously that last one works - but only for a single process and for the 
lifetime of that process. We want the pages to reside in RAM afterwards.

Anyone out there know how to correct this undesirable behaviour?

Regards,

Jim Vanns

PS. This only happens over NFS - local DB files behave as expected and fill the 
OS page cache.

-- 
Jim Vanns
Senior Software Developer
Framestore
_______________________________________________
sqlite-users mailing list
sqlite-users@sqlite.org
http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users

Reply via email to