pg_test_fsync performance

I have heard complaints that /contrib/pg_test_fsync is too slow. I
thought it was impossible to speed up pg_test_fsync without reducing its
accuracy.

However, now that I some consumer-grade SATA 2 drives, I noticed that
the slowness is really in the open_sync test:

Compare open_sync with different write sizes:
(This is designed to compare the cost of writing 16kB
in different write open_sync sizes.)
1 * 16kB open_sync write 76.421 ops/sec
2 * 8kB open_sync writes 38.689 ops/sec
4 * 4kB open_sync writes 19.140 ops/sec
8 * 2kB open_sync writes 4.938 ops/sec
16 * 1kB open_sync writes 2.480 ops/sec

These last few lines can take very long, so I developed the attached
patch that scales down the number of tests. This makes it more
reasonable to run pg_test_fsync.

I would like to apply this for PG 9.2.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +