Re: Speed up Clog Access by increasing CLOG buffers

On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 6:52 AM, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> I'm actually rather unconvinced that it's all that common that all
> subtransactions are on one page. If you have concurrency - otherwise
> there'd be not much point in this patch - they'll usually be heavily
> interleaved, no? You can argue that you don't care about subxacts,
> because they're more often used in less concurrent scenarios, but if
> that's the argument, it should actually be made.

But a single clog page holds a lot of transactions - I think it's
~32k. If you have 100 backends running, and each one allocates an XID
in turn, and then each allocates a sub-XID in turn, and then they all
commit, and then you repeat this pattern, >99% of transactions will be
on a single CLOG page. And that is a pretty pathological case.

It's true that if you have many short-running transactions interleaved
with occasional long-running transactions, and the latter use
subxacts, the optimization might fail to apply to the long-running
subxacts fairly often. But who cares? Those are, by definition, a
small percentage of the overall transaction stream.

--
Robert Haas
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