RE: RE: [COMMITTERS] pgsql/src/backend/access/transam ( xact.c xlog.c)

> > BUT, do we know for sure that sleep(0) is not optimized in 
> > the library to just return? 
> 
> We can only do our best here. I think guessing whether other backends
> are _about_ to commit is pretty shaky, and sleeping every time is a
> waste.  This seems the cleanest.

A long ago you, Bruce, made me gift - book about transaction processing
(thanks again -:)). This sleeping before fsync in commit is described
there as standard technique. And the reason is cleanest.
Men, cost of fsync is very high! { write (64 bytes) + fsync() }
takes ~ 1/50 sec. Yes, additional 1/200 sec or so results in worse
performance when there is only one backend running but greatly
increase overall performance for 100 simultaneous backends. Ie this
delay is trade off to gain better scalability.

I agreed that it must be configurable, smaller or probably 0 by
default, use approximate # of simultaneously running backends for
guessing (postmaster could maintain this number in shmem and
backends could just read it without any locking - exact number is
not required), good described as tuning patameter in documentation.
Anyway I object sleep(0).

Vadim