Re: Trouble with hashagg spill I/O pattern and costing

On Thu, 2020-05-21 at 21:13 +0200, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> 2) We could make it self-tuning, by increasing the number of blocks
> we pre-allocate. So every time we exhaust the range, we double the
> number of blocks (with a reasonable maximum, like 1024 or so). Or we
> might just increment it by 32, or something.

Attached a new version that uses the doubling behavior, and cleans it
up a bit. It also returns the unused prealloc blocks back to lts-
>freeBlocks when the tape is rewound for reading.

> IIUC the danger of pre-allocating blocks is that we might not fill
> them,
> resulting in temp file much larger than necessary. It might be
> harmless
> on some (most?) current filesystems that don't actually allocate
> space
> for blocks that are never written, but it also confuses our
> accounting
> of temporary file sizes. So we should try to limit that, and growing
> the
> number of pre-allocated blocks over time seems reasonable.

There's another danger here: it doesn't matter how well the filesystem
deals with sparse writes, because ltsWriteBlock fills in the holes with
zeros anyway. That's potentially a significant amount of wasted IO
effort if we aren't careful.

Regards,
    Jeff Davis