Re: what to revert

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 4:06 PM, Tomas Vondra
<tomas(dot)vondra(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> Overall, I think this shows that there seems to be no performance penalty
> with "disabled" vs. "reverted" - i.e. even with the least favorable (100%
> read-only) workload.

OK, that's good, as far as it goes.

> Whatever the metric is, I think it's fairly clear the patch makes the
> results way more volatile - particularly with the "immediate" case and
> higher client counts.

I think you mean only when it is enabled. Right?

Mithun and others at EnterpriseDB have been struggling with the
problem of getting reproducible results on benchmarks, even read-only
benchmarks that seem like they ought to be fairly stable, and they've
been complaining to me about that problem - not specifically with
respect to snapshot too old, but in general. I don't have a clear
understanding at this point of why a particular piece of code might
cause increased volatility, but I wish I did. In the past, I haven't
paid much attention to this, but lately it's clear that it is becoming
a significant problem when trying to benchmark, especially on
many-socket machines. I suspect it might be a problem for actual
users as well, but I know of any definite evidence that this is the
case. It's probably an area that needs a bunch of work, but I don't
understand the problem well enough to know what we should be doing.

> What I plan to do next, over the next week:
>
> 1) Wait for the second run of "immediate" to complete (should happen in a
> few hours)
>
> 2) Do tests with other workloads (mostly read-only, read-write).

Sounds good.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company