Re: Move unused buffers to freelist

On Wednesday, July 03, 2013 12:27 PM Simon Riggs wrote:
On 28 June 2013 05:52, Amit Kapila <amit(dot)kapila(at)huawei(dot)com> wrote:
 
>> As per my understanding Summarization of points raised by you and Andres
>> which this patch should address to have a bigger win:

>> 1. Bgwriter needs to be improved so that it can help in reducing usage
count
>> and finding next victim buffer
>>   (run the clock sweep and add buffers to the free list).
>>2. SetLatch for bgwriter (wakeup bgwriter) when elements in freelist are
>>less.
>>3. Split the workdone globallock (Buffreelist) in StrategyGetBuffer
>>   (a spinlock for the freelist, and an lwlock for the clock sweep).
>>4. Separate processes for writing dirty buffers and moving buffers to
>>freelist
>>5. Bgwriter needs to be more aggressive, logic based on which it
calculates
>>how many buffers it needs to process needs to be improved.
>>6. There can be contention around buffer mapping locks, but we can focus
on
>>it later
>>7. cacheline bouncing around the buffer header spinlocks, is there
anything
>>we can do to reduce this?

>My perspectives here would be

> * BufFreelistLock is a huge issue. Finding a next victim block needs to be
an O(1) operation, yet it is currently much worse than that. Measuring
> contention on that lock hides that problem, since having shared buffers
lock up for 100ms or more but only occasionally is a huge problem, even if
it
> doesn't occur frequently enough for the averaged contention to show as an
issue.

To optimize finding next victim buffer, I am planning to run the clock
sweep in background. Apart from that do you have any idea to make it closer
to O(1)?

With Regards,
Amit Kapila.