Re: gettimeofday is at the end of its usefulness?

On Tue, May 13, 2014 at 3:58 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> There's also a CLOCK_REALTIME_COARSE selector, which is noticeably faster
> --- about 10nsec for me --- but the output appears to only advance once
> every millisecond, so it's probably useless for our purposes.  The other
> selectors mentioned in the Linux man page are considerably slower than
> CLOCK_REALTIME for me, suggesting that they actually call into the kernel.

What Linux kernel version is in use here? Apparently, as I think
you've stated another way, more recent versions have VDSO for this,
which can make a big difference. This article seems like a sensible
guide to all of this:

https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_MRG/1.3/html/Realtime_Tuning_Guide/sect-Realtime_Tuning_Guide-General_System_Tuning-gettimeofday_speedup.html

CLOCK_REALTIME_COARSE seemingly influences precision in a way that
allows user space applications to decide on their precision/cost
trade-off, rather than being forced to use the system default (that
procfs surfaces) through gettimeofday():
http://lwn.net/Articles/342018/

I can see a benefit in exposing this trade-off to Postgres code
directly. I still think that a correlated reference period will prove
useful, and while there are a number of ways to amortize the cost of
repeatedly (coarsely) getting the wall time in the ordinary course of
choosing victim buffers, it would be nice to do this too.
-- 
Peter Geoghegan