Re: Improve lseek scalability v3

Excerpts from Andres Freund's message of vie sep 16 14:27:33 -0300 2011:
> Hi,
> On Friday 16 Sep 2011 17:36:20 Matthew Wilcox wrote:

> > Does the query planner need to know the exact number of bytes in the file,
> > or is it after an order-of-magnitude? Or to-the-nearest-gigabyte?
> It depends on where the information is used. For some of the uses it needs to
> be exact (the assumed size is rechecked after acquiring a lock preventing
> extension) at other places I guess it would be ok if the accuracy got lower
> with bigger files (those files won't ever get bigger than 1GB).

One other thing we're interested in is portability. I mean, even if
Linux were to introduce a new hypothetical syscall that was able to
return the file size at a ridiculously low cost, we probably wouldn't
use it because it'd be Linux-specific. So an improvement of lseek()
seems to be the best option.

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Álvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
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