Re: 8.4 Performance improvements: was Re: Proposal of tunable fix for scalability of 8.4

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Mar 13, 2009 at 10:06 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
>> I assume you meant effective_io_concurrency.  We'd still need a special
>> case because the default is currently hard-wired at 1, not 0, if
>> configure thinks the function exists.  Also there's a posix_fadvise call
>> in xlog.c that that parameter doesn't control anyhow.
>
> I think 1 should mean no prefetching, rather than 0.  If the number of
> concurrent I/O requests was 0, that would mean you couldn't perform
> any I/O at all.

That is actually how I had intended it but apparently I messed it up at some
point such that later patches were doing some prefetching at 1 and there was
no way to disable it. When Tom reviewed it he corrected the inability to
disable prefetching by making 0 disable prefetching.

I didn't think it was worth raising as an issue but I didn't realize we were
currently doing prefetching by default? i didn't realize that. Even on a
system with posix_fadvise there's nothing much to be gained unless the data is
on a RAID device, so the original objection holds anyways. We shouldn't do any
prefetching unless the user tells us to.

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  Gregory Stark
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