Re: modeling parallel contention (was: Parallel Append implementation)

On 6 May 2017 at 13:44, Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> In Linux, each process that opens a file gets its own 'file'
> object[1][5]. Each of those has it's own 'file_ra_state'
> object[2][3], used by ondemand_readahead[4] for sequential read
> detection. So I speculate that page-at-a-time parallel seq scan must
> look like random access to Linux.
>
> In FreeBSD the situation looks similar. Each process that opens a
> file gets a 'file' object[8] which has members 'f_seqcount' and
> 'f_nextoff'[6]. These are used by the 'sequential_heuristics'
> function[7] which affects the ioflag which UFS/FFS uses to control
> read ahead (see ffs_read). So I speculate that page-at-a-time
> parallel seq scan must look like random access to FreeBSD too.
>
> In both cases I suspect that if you'd inherited (or sent the file
> descriptor to the other process via obscure tricks), it would actually
> work because they'd have the same 'file' entry, but that's clearly not
> workable for md.c.
>

Interesting!

> Experimentation required...

Indeed. I do remember long discussions on this before Parallel seq
scan went in, but I don't recall if anyone checked any OS kernels to
see what they did.

We really need a machine with good IO concurrency, and not too much
RAM to test these things out. It could well be that for a suitability
large enough table we'd want to scan a whole 1GB extent per worker.

I did post a patch to have heap_parallelscan_nextpage() use atomics
instead of locking over in [1], but I think doing atomics there does
not rule out also adding batching later. In fact, I think it
structures things so batching would be easier than it is today.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAKJS1f9tgsPhqBcoPjv9_KUPZvTLCZ4jy=B=bhqgaKn7cYzm-w@mail.gmail.com

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David Rowley http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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