Re: really lazy vacuums?

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 6:08 PM, Jim Nasby <jim(at)nasby(dot)net> wrote:
> Has anyone looked at the overhead of measuring how long IO requests to the kernel take? If we did that not only could we get an idea of what our IO workload looked like, we could also figure out whether a block came out of cache or not. That information could potentially be useful to the planner, but even if the database couldn't use that knowledge itself it would be a damn useful statistic to have... IMHO, far more useful than our current hit rate statistics.
>

I've done this -- actually better, I used mincore to actually check
whether the block was in cache before issuing the read -- but it turns
out you can't get what you're looking for this way.

It turns out when you do this you see one block being read from disk
followed by n blocks that all appear to be cache hits. Because they've
been prefetched by the kernel.

What you end up with is actually something like the number of iops
which is also an interesting measure but not really what you were
looking for.

My getrusage patch, which I should still dig out though it's rather
too late to be committing now unless someone tells me otherwise, would
tell you how much i/o a plan node actually did. But you won't know
which blocks did the i/o since I was only tracking totals for the plan
node. That's probably what you're looking for here.

--
greg