Re: Incremental checkopints

On 07/29/2011 11:04 AM, jordani(at)go-link(dot)net wrote:
> I think that current implementation of checkpoints is not good for huge
> shared buffer cache and for many WAL segments. If there is more buffers
> and if buffers can be written rarely more updates of buffers can be
> combined so total number of writes to disk will be significantly less. I
> think that incremental checkpoints can achieve this goal (maybe more) and
> price is additional memory (about 1/1000 of size of buffer cache).
>

The current code optimizes for buffers that are written frequently.
Those will sit in shared_buffers and in the hoped for case, only be
written once at checkpoint time.

There are two issues with adopting increment checkpoints instead, one
fundamental, the other solvable but not started on yet:

1) Postponing writes as long as possible always improves the resulting
throughput of those writes. Any incremental checkpoint approach will
detune throughput by some amount. If you make writes go out more often,
they will be less efficient; that's just how things work if you
benchmark anything that allows write combining. Any incremental
checkpoint approach is likely to improve latency in some cases if it
works well, while decreasing throughput in most cases.

2) The incremental checkpoint approach used by other databases, such as
the MySQL implementation, works by tracking what transaction IDs were
associated with a buffer update. The current way PostgreSQL saves
buffer sync information for the checkpoint to process things doesn't
store enough information to do that. As you say, the main price there
is some additional memory.

From my perspective, the main problem with plans to tweak the
checkpoint code is that we don't have a really good benchmark that
tracks both throughput and latency to test proposed changes against.
Mark Wong has been working to get his TCP-E clone DBT-5 running
regularly for that purpose, and last I heard that was basically done at
this point--he's running daily tests now. There's already a small pile
of patches that adjust checkpoint behavior around that were postponed
from being included in 9.1 mainly because it was hard to prove they were
useful given the benchmark used to test them, pgbench. I have higher
hopes for DBT-5 as being a test that gives informative data in this
area. I would want to go back and revisit the existing patches (sorted
checkpoints, spread sync) before launching into this whole new area. I
don't think any of those has even been proven not to work, they just
didn't help the slightly unrealistic pgbench write-heavy workload.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us