Re: Asynchronous and "direct" IO support for PostgreSQL.

> On Tue, Feb 23, 2021 at 02:03:44AM -0800, Andres Freund wrote:
>
> over the last ~year I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we could
> add AIO (asynchronous IO) and DIO (direct IO) support to postgres. While
> there's still a *lot* of open questions, I think I now have a decent handle on
> most of the bigger architectural questions. Thus this long email.
>
> Just to be clear: I don't expect the current to design to survive as-is. If
> there's a few sentences below that sound a bit like describing the new world,
> that's because they're from the README.md in the patch series...

Thanks!

> Comments? Questions?
>
> I plan to send separate emails about smaller chunks of this seperately -
> the whole topic is just too big. In particular I plan to send something
> around buffer locking / state management - it's a one of the core issues
> around this imo.

I'm curious about control knobs for this feature, it's somewhat related
to the stats questions also discussed in this thread. I guess most
important of those are max_aio_in_flight, io_max_concurrency etc, and
they're going to be a hard limits, right? I'm curious if it makes sense
to explore possibility to have these sort of "backpressure", e.g. if
number of inflight requests is too large calculate inflight_limit a bit
lower than possible (to avoid hard performance deterioration when the db
is trying to do too much IO, and rather do it smooth). From what I
remember io_uring does have something similar only for SQPOLL. Another
similar question if this could be used for throttling of some overloaded
workers in case of misconfigured clients or such?