Re: Support Parallel Query Execution in Executor

I am working with Solaris on SPARC almost exclusively and I believe Josh said that Sun was the one who found the bursty behavior with scans. Has it been confirmed that this is the case on all/most platforms?

Myron Scott
-----Original Message-----

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
Subj: Re: [HACKERS] Support Parallel Query Execution in Executor
Date: Sun Apr 9, 2006 11:48 am
Size: 1K
To: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(at)gmail(dot)com>
cc: pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org

"Gregory Maxwell" <gmaxwell(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On 4/9/06, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> So before we go inventing complicated bits of code with lots of added
>> overhead, we should first find out exactly why the system doesn't
>> already work the way it's supposed to.

> But is that really the behavior we should expect?

Certainly. If the OS has readahead logic at all, it ought to think that
a seqscan of a large table qualifies. Your arguments seem to question
whether readahead is useful at all --- but they would apply *just as
well* to an app doing its own readahead, which is what is really
getting proposed in this thread.

Before we go replacing a standard OS-level facility with our own
version, we need to have a much clearer idea of why the OS isn't getting
the job done for us. Otherwise we're likely to write a large amount of
code and find out that it doesn't work very well either.

regards, tom lane

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