Re: WIP: Fast GiST index build

On 30.08.2011 13:29, Alexander Korotkov wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 1:13 PM, Heikki Linnakangas<
> heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com>  wrote:
>
>> So, over 50% of the CPU time is spent in choosing a block from the
>> temporary files. That should be pretty easy to improve..
>>
> Yes, probably we can just remove free blocks sorting.

Ok, the first results are in for that:
         testname          |   nrows   |    duration     | accesses
---------------------------+-----------+-----------------+---------- points unordered buffered | 250000000 |
06:00:23.707579|  4049832
 
From the previous test runs, the unbuffered index build took under 4 
hours, so even though this is a lot better than with the sorting, it's 
still a loss compared to non-buffered build.

I had vmstat running during most of this index build. At a quick glance, 
it doesn't seem to be CPU bound anymore. I suspect the buffers in the 
temporary file gets very fragmented. Or, we're reading it in backwards 
order because the buffers work in a LIFO fashion. The system seems to be 
doing about 5 MB/s of I/O during the build, which sounds like a figure 
you'd get for more or less random I/O.

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