Re: [HACKERS] Faster CREATE DATABASE by delaying fsync (was 8.4.1 ubuntu karmic slow createdb)

Andres Freund wrote:
> As I said the real benefit only occurred after adding posix_fadvise(..,
> FADV_DONTNEED) which is somewhat plausible, because i.e. the directory entries
> don't need to get scheduled for every file and because the kernel can reorder a
> whole directory nearly sequentially. Without the advice it the kernel doesn't
> know in time that it should write that data back and it wont do it for 5
> seconds by default on linux or such...
>
I know they just fiddled with the logic in the last release, but for
most of the Linux kernels out there now pdflush wakes up every 5 seconds
by default.  But typically it only worries about writing things that
have been in the queue for 30 seconds or more until you've filled quite
a bit of memory, so that's also an interesting number.  I tried to
document the main tunables here and describe how they fit together at
http://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/linux-pdflush.htm

It would be interesting to graph the "Dirty" and "Writeback" figures in
/proc/meminfo over time with and without this patch in place.  That
should make it obvious what the kernel is doing differently in the two
cases.

--
Greg Smith    2ndQuadrant   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg@2ndQuadrant.com  www.2ndQuadrant.com