Re: ARC patent

Simon Riggs wrote:
>>However, I think the ARC replacement should *not* be a fundamental
>>change in behavior: the algorithm should still attempt to balance
>>recency and frequency, to adjust dynamically to changes in workload, to
>>avoid "sequential flooding", and to allow constant-time page
>>replacement.
>
> Agreed: Those are the requirements. It must also scale better as well.

On thinking about this more, I'm not sure these are the right goals for
an 8.0.x replacement algorithm. For 8.1 we should definitely Do The
Right Thing and develop a complete ARC replacement. For 8.0.x, I wonder
if it would be better to just replace ARC with LRU. The primary
advantage to doing this is LRU's simplicity -- if we're concerned about
introducing regressions in stability into 8.0, this is likely the best
way to reduce the chance of that happening. Furthermore, LRU's behavior
with PostgreSQL is well-known and has been extensively tested. A complex
ARC replacement would receive even less testing than ARC itself has
received -- which isn't a whole lot, in comparison with LRU.

Of course, the downside is that we lose the benefits of ARC or an
ARC-like algorithm in 8.0. That would be unfortunate, but I don't think
it is a catastrophe. The other bufmgr-related changes (vacuum hints,
bgwriter and vacuum delay) should ensure that VACUUM still has a much
reduced impact on system performance. Sequential scans will still flood
the cache, but I don't view that as an enormous problem. In other words,
I think a more intelligent replacement policy would be nice to have, but
at this point in the 8.0 development cycle we should go with the
simplest solution that we know is likely to work -- namely, LRU.

-Neil