Re: 8K recordsize bad on ZFS?

As I said, the record size is applied on the file creation :-)
so by copying your data from one directory to another one you've made
the new record size applied on the newly created files :-) (equal to
backup restore if there was not enough space)..

Did you try to redo the same but still keeping record size equal 8K ? ;-)

I think the problem you've observed is simply related to the
copy-on-write nature of ZFS - if you bring any modification to the
data your sequential order of pages was broken with a time, and
finally the sequential read was transformed to the random access.. But
once you've re-copied your files again - the right order was applied
again.

BTW, 8K is recommended for OLTP workloads, but for DW you may stay
with 128K without problem.

Rgds,
-Dimitri

On 5/10/10, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> On 5/9/10 1:45 AM, Dimitri wrote:
>> Josh,
>>
>> it'll be great if you explain how did you change the records size to
>> 128K? - as this size is assigned on the file creation and cannot be
>> changed later - I suppose that you made a backup of your data and then
>> process a full restore.. is it so?
>
> You can change the recordsize of the zpool dynamically, then simply copy
> the data directory (with PostgreSQL shut down) to a new directory on
> that zpool. This assumes that you have enough space on the zpool, of
> course.
>
> We didn't test how it would work to let the files in the Postgres
> instance get gradually replaced by "natural" updating.
>
> --
> -- Josh Berkus
> PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
> http://www.pgexperts.com
>
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