Re: Detrimental performance impact of ringbuffers on performance

On Wed, Apr 6, 2016 at 12:57:16PM +0200, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
>
> While benchmarking on hydra
> (c.f. http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/20160406104352.5bn3ehkcsceja65c%40alap3.anarazel.de),
> which has quite slow IO, I was once more annoyed by how incredibly long
> the vacuum at the the end of a pgbench -i takes.
>
> The issue is that, even for an entirely shared_buffers resident scale,
> essentially no data is cached in shared buffers. The COPY to load data
> uses a 16MB ringbuffer. Then vacuum uses a 256KB ringbuffer. Which means
> that copy immediately writes and evicts all data. Then vacuum reads &
> writes the data in small chunks; again evicting nearly all buffers. Then
> the creation of the ringbuffer has to read that data *again*.
>
> That's fairly idiotic.
>
> While it's not easy to fix this in the general case, we introduced those
> ringbuffers for a reason after all, I think we at least should add a
> special case for loads where shared_buffers isn't fully used yet. Why
> not skip using buffers from the ringbuffer if there's buffers on the
> freelist? If we add buffers gathered from there to the ringlist, we
> should have few cases that regress.
>
> Additionally, maybe we ought to increase the ringbuffer sizes again one
> of these days? 256kb for VACUUM is pretty damn low.

Is this a TODO?

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Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

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