Date: Fri, 30 Sep 2005 16:38:00 -0400
From: "Jignesh K. Shah" <J.K.Shah@Sun.COM>
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] A Better External Sort?
In-reply-to: 
 <31833713.1128111650174.JavaMail.root@elwamui-polski.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
To: Ron Peacetree <rjpeace@earthlink.net>
Cc: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org,
	pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Message-id: <433DA228.4060103@sun.com>
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References: 
 <31833713.1128111650174.JavaMail.root@elwamui-polski.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

I have seen similar performance as Josh and my reasoning is as follows:

* WAL is the biggest bottleneck with its default size of 16MB. Many 
people hate to recompile the code   to change its default, and 
increasing checkpoint segments help but still there is lot of overhead 
in the rotation of WAL files (Even putting WAL on tmpfs shows that it is 
still slow). Having an option for bigger size is helpful to a small 
extent percentagewise (and frees up CPU a bit in doing file rotation)

* Growing files: Even though this is OS dependent but it does spend lot 
of time doing small 8K block increases to grow files. If we can signal 
bigger chunks to grow or "pre-grow"  to expected size of  data files 
that will help a lot in such cases.

* COPY command had restriction but that has been fixed to a large 
extent.(Great job)

But ofcourse I have lost touch with programming and can't begin to 
understand PostgreSQL code to change it myself.

Regards,
Jignesh


Ron Peacetree wrote:

>That 11MBps was your =bulk load= speed.  If just loading a table
>is this slow, then there are issues with basic physical IO, not just
>IO during sort operations.
>
>As I said, the obvious candidates are inefficient physical layout
>and/or flawed IO code.
>
>Until the basic IO issues are addressed, we could replace the
>present sorting code with infinitely fast sorting code and we'd
>still be scrod performance wise.
>
>So why does basic IO suck so badly?
>
>Ron  
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
>Sent: Sep 30, 2005 1:23 PM
>To: Ron Peacetree <rjpeace@earthlink.net>
>Cc: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org, pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
>Subject: Re: [HACKERS] [PERFORM] A Better External Sort?
>
>Ron,
>
>  
>
>>Hmmm.
>>60GB/5400secs= 11MBps.  That's ssllooww.  So the first
>>problem is evidently our physical layout and/or HD IO layer
>>sucks.
>>    
>>
>
>Actually, it's much worse than that, because the sort is only dealing 
>with one column.  As I said, monitoring the iostat our top speed was 
>2.2mb/s.
>
>--Josh
>
>
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