Re: CLOG contention

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 12:33 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Oh btw, I haven't looked at that code recently, but I have a nasty
> feeling that there are parts of it that assume that the number of
> buffers it is managing is fairly small.  Cranking up the number
> might require more work than just changing the value.

Oh, you mean like the fact that it tries to do strict LRU page
replacement? *rolls eyes* We seem to have named the SLRU system
after one of its scalability limitations...

I think there probably are some scalability limits to the current
implementation, but also I think we could probably increase the
current value modestly with something less than a total rewrite.
Linearly scanning the slot array won't scale indefinitely, but I think
it will scale to more than 8 elements. The performance results I
posted previously make it clear that 8 -> 32 is a net win at least on
that system. One fairly low-impact option might be to make the cache
less than fully associative - e.g. given N buffers, a page with pageno
% 4 == X is only allowed to be in a slot numbered between (N/4)*X and
(N/4)*(X+1)-1. That likely would be counterproductive at N = 8 but
might be OK at larger values. We could also switch to using a hash
table but that seems awfully heavy-weight.

The real question is how to decide how many buffers to create. You
suggested a formula based on shared_buffers, but what would that
formula be? I mean, a typical large system is going to have 1,048,576
shared buffers, and it probably needs less than 0.1% of that amount of
CLOG buffers. My guess is that there's no real reason to skimp: if
you are really tight for memory, you might want to crank this down,
but otherwise you may as well just go with whatever we decide the
best-performing value is.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
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