Re: Can postgres create a file with physically continuous blocks.

On 22.12.2010 03:45, Rob Wultsch wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 21, 2010 at 4:49 AM, Robert Haas<robertmhaas@gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 1:10 PM, Jim Nasby<jim@nasby.net>  wrote:
>>> On Dec 19, 2010, at 1:10 AM, flyusa2010 fly wrote:
>>>> Does postgres make an effort to create a file with physically continuous blocks?
>>>
>>> AFAIK all files are expanded as needed. I don't think there's any flags you can pass to the filesystem to tell it
"thisfile will eventually be 1GB in size". So, we're basically at the mercy of the FS to try and keep things
contiguous.
>>
>> There have been some reports that we would do better on some
>> filesystems if we extended the file more than a block at a time, as we
>> do today.  However, AFAIK, no one is pursuing this ATM.
>
> The has been found to be the case in the MySQL world, particularly
> when ext3 is in use:
> http://forge.mysql.com/worklog/task.php?id=4925
> http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=194501560932

These seem to be about extending the transaction log, and we already 
pre-allocate the WAL. The WAL is repeatedly fsync'd, so I can understand 
that extending that in small chunks would hurt performance a lot, as the 
filesystem needs to flush the metadata changes to disk at every commit. 
However, that's not an issue with extending data files, they are only 
fsync'd at checkpoints.

It might well be advantageous to extend data files in larger chunks too, 
but it's probably nowhere near as important as with the WAL.

> Also, InnoDB has an option for how much data should be allocated at
> the end of a tablespace when it needs to grow:
> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-parameters.html#sysvar_innodb_data_file_path

Hmm, innodb_autoextend_increment seems more like what we're discussing 
here 
(http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-parameters.html#sysvar_innodb_autoextend_increment). 
If I'm reading that correctly, InnoDB defaults to extending files in 8MB 
chunks.

--   Heikki Linnakangas  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com