Re: Spread checkpoint sync

From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
To: Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
Cc: Rob Wultsch <wultsch(at)gmail(dot)com>, Heikki Linnakangas <heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>, Jeff Janes <jeff(dot)janes(at)gmail(dot)com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Spread checkpoint sync
Date: 2010-12-07 02:26:28
Message-ID: 1291688119-sup-6606@alvh.no-ip.org
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Excerpts from Greg Smith's message of dom dic 05 20:02:48 -0300 2010:

> When ends up happening if you push toward fully sync I/O is the design
> you see in some other databases, where you need multiple writer
> processes. Then requests for new pages can continue to allocate as
> needed, while keeping any one write from blocking things. That's one
> sort of a way to simulate asynchronous I/O, and you can substitute true
> async I/O instead in many of those implementations. We didn't have much
> luck with portability on async I/O when that was last experimented with,
> and having multiple background writer processes seems like overkill;
> that whole direction worries me.

Why would multiple bgwriter processes worry you?

Of course, it wouldn't work to have multiple processes trying to execute
a checkpoint simultaneously, but what if we separated the tasks so that
one process is in charge of checkpoints, and another oneZis in charge of
the LRU scan?

--
Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support

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