Re: Allowing multiple concurrent base backups

From: David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org>
To: Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>
Cc: marcin mank <marcin(dot)mank(at)gmail(dot)com>, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Allowing multiple concurrent base backups
Date: 2011-01-12 15:21:08
Message-ID: 20110112152108.GB14639@fetter.org
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On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 05:17:38PM +0200, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> On 12.01.2011 17:15, David Fetter wrote:
> >On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 10:26:05AM +0100, marcin mank wrote:
> >>Considering that parallell base backups would be io-bound (or
> >>network-bound), there is little need to actually run them in parallell
> >
> >That's not actually true. Backups at the moment are CPU-bound, and
> >running them in parallel is one way to make them closer to I/O-bound,
> >which is what they *should* be.
>
> That's a different kind of "parallel". We're talking about taking
> multiple backups in parallel, each using one process, and you're
> talking about taking one backup using multiple parallel processes or
> threads.

Good point. The idea that IO/network bandwidth is always saturated by
one backup just isn't true, though. Take the case of multiple
independent NICs, e.g.

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
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