Re: ARC patent

On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 23:17 +1100, Neil Conway wrote:
> Simon Riggs wrote:
> >>However, I think the ARC replacement should *not* be a fundamental
> >>change in behavior: the algorithm should still attempt to balance
> >>recency and frequency, to adjust dynamically to changes in workload, to
> >>avoid "sequential flooding", and to allow constant-time page
> >>replacement.
> >
> > Agreed: Those are the requirements. It must also scale better as well.
>
> For 8.1 we should definitely Do The
> Right Thing and develop a complete ARC replacement.

Agreed. That would be my focus.

> For 8.0.x, I wonder
> if it would be better to just replace ARC with LRU. The primary
> advantage to doing this is LRU's simplicity -- if we're concerned about
> introducing regressions in stability into 8.0, this is likely the best
> way to reduce the chance of that happening. Furthermore, LRU's behavior
> with PostgreSQL is well-known and has been extensively tested. A complex
> ARC replacement would receive even less testing than ARC itself has
> received -- which isn't a whole lot, in comparison with LRU.
>
> Of course, the downside is that we lose the benefits of ARC or an
> ARC-like algorithm in 8.0. That would be unfortunate, but I don't think
> it is a catastrophe. The other bufmgr-related changes (vacuum hints,
> bgwriter and vacuum delay) should ensure that VACUUM still has a much
> reduced impact on system performance. Sequential scans will still flood
> the cache, but I don't view that as an enormous problem. In other words,
> I think a more intelligent replacement policy would be nice to have, but
> at this point in the 8.0 development cycle we should go with the
> simplest solution that we know is likely to work -- namely, LRU.

Agree with everything apart from the idea that seq scan flooding isn't
an issue. I definitely think it is.

--
Best Regards, Simon Riggs