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Andres Freund 428b1d6b29 Allow to trigger kernel writeback after a configurable number of writes. ... Currently writes to the main data files of postgres all go through the OS page cache. This means that some operating systems can end up collecting a large number of dirty buffers in their respective page caches. When these dirty buffers are flushed to storage rapidly, be it because of fsync(), timeouts, or dirty ratios, latency for other reads and writes can increase massively. This is the primary reason for regular massive stalls observed in real world scenarios and artificial benchmarks; on rotating disks stalls on the order of hundreds of seconds have been observed. On linux it is possible to control this by reducing the global dirty limits significantly, reducing the above problem. But global configuration is rather problematic because it'll affect other applications; also PostgreSQL itself doesn't always generally want this behavior, e.g. for temporary files it's undesirable. Several operating systems allow some control over the kernel page cache. Linux has sync_file_range(2), several posix systems have msync(2) and posix_fadvise(2). sync_file_range(2) is preferable because it requires no special setup, whereas msync() requires the to-be-flushed range to be mmap'ed. For the purpose of flushing dirty data posix_fadvise(2) is the worst alternative, as flushing dirty data is just a side-effect of POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED, which also removes the pages from the page cache. Thus the feature is enabled by default only on linux, but can be enabled on all systems that have any of the above APIs. While desirable and likely possible this patch does not contain an implementation for windows. With the infrastructure added, writes made via checkpointer, bgwriter and normal user backends can be flushed after a configurable number of writes. Each of these sources of writes controlled by a separate GUC, checkpointer_flush_after, bgwriter_flush_after and backend_flush_after respectively; they're separate because the number of flushes that are good are separate, and because the performance considerations of controlled flushing for each of these are different. A later patch will add checkpoint sorting - after that flushes from the ckeckpoint will almost always be desirable. Bgwriter flushes are most of the time going to be random, which are slow on lots of storage hardware. Flushing in backends works well if the storage and bgwriter can keep up, but if not it can have negative consequences. This patch is likely to have negative performance consequences without checkpoint sorting, but unfortunately so has sorting without flush control. Discussion: alpine.DEB.2.10.1506011320000.28433@sto Author: Fabien Coelho and Andres Freund		10 years ago
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src	Allow to trigger kernel writeback after a configurable number of writes.	10 years ago
KNOWN_BUGS	…
MISSING_FEATURES	…
Makefile	…
TODO	…
bug.template	Stamp HEAD as 9.6devel.	11 years ago