Re: Monitoring buffercache...

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 12:52 PM, Brad Nicholson
<bnichols(at)ca(dot)afilias(dot)info> wrote:
>> I just ran it in a loop over and over on my 8 core opteron server and
>> it ran the load factor up by almost exactly 1.0. Under our normal
>> daily load, it sits at 1.9 to 2.5, and it climbed to 2.9 under the new
>> load of running that query over and over. So, it doesn't seem to be
>> blocking or anything.
>
> The internal docs for pg_buffercache_pages.c state:
>
> "To get a consistent picture of the buffer state, we must lock all
> partitions of the buffer map. Needless to say, this is horrible
> for concurrency. Must grab locks in increasing order to avoid
> possible deadlocks."

Well, the pg hackers tend to take a parnoid view (it's a good thing
TM) on things like this. My guess is that the period of time for
which pg_buffercache takes locks on the buffer map are short enough
that it isn't a real big deal on a fast enough server. On mine, it
certainly had no real negative effects for the 5 minutes or so it was
running in a loop. None I could see, and we run hundreds of queries
per second on our system.

Of course, for certain other types of loads it could be a much bigger
issue. But for our load, on our machine, it was virtually
unnoticeable.