Re: [HACKERS] What I'm working on

On Sun, 23 Aug 1998, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Most filesystem base block sizes are 8k.  Making anything larger is not
> going to gain much.  I don't think we can support block sizes like 12k
> because the filesystem is going to sync stuff in 8k chunks.
>
> Seems like we should do the most user-transparent thing and just allow
> spanning rows.

    The blocksize patch wasn't a "user-land" feature, its an admin
level...no?  The admin sets it at the createdb level...no?

    Again, I'm curious as to why either/or is mutual exclusive?

    Let's put it this way, from a performance perspective, which one
would provide more?  Again, I'm thinking of this from the admin angle, not
user.  I create a database whose tuples, in general, exceed 8k.  vacuum
kindly tells me this, so, to improve performance, I dump my databases, and
because this is a specialized application, its on its own file system.
So, I reformat that drive with a larger blocksize, to match the blocksize
I'm about to set my database to (yes, I do do similar to this to optimize
file systems for news, so it isn't too hypothetical)...

    Bear in mind, I am not arguing for one of them, I'm arguing for
both of them...unless there is some architectural reason why both can't be
implemented at the same time...?

Marc G. Fournier
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy@hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org