Re: increasing the default WAL segment size

On 2016-08-24 23:26:51 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 10:54 PM, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> > and I'm also rather doubtful that it's actually without overhead.
> 
> Really?  Where do you think the overhead would come from?

ATM we do a math involving XLOG_BLCKSZ in a bunch of places (including
doing a lot of %). Some of that happens with exclusive lwlocks held, and
some even with a spinlock held IIRC. Making that variable won't be
free. Whether it's actually measurabel - hard to say. I do remember
Heikki fighting hard to simplify some parts of the critical code during
xlog scalability stuff, and that that even involved moving minor amounts
of math out of critical sections.

> What sort of test would you run to try to detect it?

Xlog scalability tests (parallel copy, parallel inserts...), and
decoding speed (pg_xlogdump --stats?)