Re: Clock with Adaptive Replacement

Thank you very much for response.

I am not sure that CART can significantly  improve PostgreSQL 
performance - I just want to know opinion of community about
CAR/CART and other possible alternative to GCLOCK algorithm.

Looks like it CAR really provides better cache hit ratio and so at some 
workloads should increase Postgres performance.
But now amount of memory at servers is large enough to completely keep 
most of typical databases in cache.
So time of locating buffer in cache is more critical then time of buffer 
eviction.
And here CART doesn't provide any benefits comparing with GCLOCK algorithm.

One of the problems with GCLOCK algorithm from my point of view is that 
for large caches, containing larger number of pages locating victim page 
can take substantial amount of time, because we have to perform several 
turnovers before some count becomes zero.  In theory CART can address 
this problem because there are not counters - justs single bit per page.




On 12.02.2016 18:55, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 11, 2016 at 4:02 PM, Konstantin Knizhnik
> <k.knizhnik@postgrespro.ru> wrote:
>> What do you think about improving cache replacement clock-sweep algorithm in
>> PostgreSQL with adaptive version proposed in this article:
>>
>>      http://www-cs.stanford.edu/~sbansal/pubs/fast04.pdf
>>
>> Are there some well known drawbacks of this approach or it will be
>> interesting to adopt this algorithm to PostgreSQL and measure it impact om
>> performance under different workloads?
>> I find this ten years old thread:
>>
>> http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/d2jkde$6bg$1@sea.gmane.org#d2jkde$6bg$1@sea.gmane.org
>>
>> but it mostly discus possible patent issues with another algorithm ARC (CAR
>> is inspired by ARC,  but it is different algorithm).
>> As far as I know there are several problems with current clock-sweep
>> algorithm in PostgreSQL, especially for very large caches.
>> May be CAR can address some of them?
> Maybe, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating.  Just because an
> algorithm is smarter, newer, and better in general than our current
> algorithm - and really, it wouldn't be hard - doesn't mean that it
> will actually solve the problems we care about.  A few of my
> EnterpriseDB colleagues spent a lot of time benchmarking various
> tweaks to our current algorithm last year and were unable to construct
> a test case where it sped anything up.  If they tried the same tweaks
> against the 9.4 source base, they could get a speedup.  But 9.5 had
> locking improvements around buffer eviction, and with those
> improvements committed there was no longer any measurable benefit to
> improving the quality of buffer eviction decisions.  That's a
> surprising result, to me anyway, and somebody else might well find a
> test case where a benefit can be shown - but our research was not
> successful.
>
> I think it's important to spend time and energy figuring out exactly
> what the problems with our current algorithm are.  We know in general
> terms that usage counts tend to converge to either 5 or 0 and
> therefore sometimes evict buffers both at great cost and almost
> randomly.  But what's a lot less clear is how much that actually hurts
> us given that we are relying on the OS cache anyway.  It may be that
> we need to fix some other things before or after improving the buffer
> eviction algorithm before we actually get a performance benefit.  I
> suspect, for example, that a lot of the problems with large
> shared_buffers settings have to do with the bgwriter and checkpointer
> behavior rather than with the buffer eviction algorithm; and that
> others have to do with cache duplication between PostgreSQL and the
> operating system.  So, I would suggest (although of course it's up to
> you) that you might want to focus on experiments that will help you
> understand where the problems are before you plunge into writing code
> to fix them.
>

-- 
Konstantin Knizhnik
Postgres Professional: http://www.postgrespro.com
The Russian Postgres Company