Re: [PATCH] Using pread instead of lseek (with analysis)

Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> What follows is the detailed analysis of the change. My conclusion is
> that on Linux at least where the syscall overhead is so low, it's not
> worth the change for performance. It is cleaner code-wise IMHO.

How is it cleaner code-wise to debug and maintain two #ifdef'd code
paths instead of one?  (And when I say "debug", I mean "I don't believe
FileSeek still works".  One reason that the patch seems unmaintainable
to me as-is is that it creates a subtle, critical, and undocumented
difference in the semantic meaning of the seekPos variable: in one case
it's tracking the kernel's own seek position, and in the other it isn't.)

> What this tells me is that lseek time is swamped by actual read time,
> so not a major benefit in most cases.

It would be reasonable to check results in fully-cached cases, which
would be the best real-world scenario for this to show any improvement
in.

            regards, tom lane