Re: [PERFORM] A Better External Sort?

That 11MBps was your =bulk load= speed. If just loading a table
is this slow, then there are issues with basic physical IO, not just
IO during sort operations.

As I said, the obvious candidates are inefficient physical layout
and/or flawed IO code.

Until the basic IO issues are addressed, we could replace the
present sorting code with infinitely fast sorting code and we'd
still be scrod performance wise.

So why does basic IO suck so badly?

Ron

-----Original Message-----
From: Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com>
Sent: Sep 30, 2005 1:23 PM
To: Ron Peacetree <rjpeace(at)earthlink(dot)net>
Cc: pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org, pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] [PERFORM] A Better External Sort?

Ron,

> Hmmm.
> 60GB/5400secs= 11MBps. That's ssllooww. So the first
> problem is evidently our physical layout and/or HD IO layer
> sucks.

Actually, it's much worse than that, because the sort is only dealing
with one column. As I said, monitoring the iostat our top speed was
2.2mb/s.

--Josh