Re: BitmapHeapScan streaming read user and prelim refactoring

On 3/29/24 22:39, Thomas Munro wrote:
> ...
>
>> I don't recall seeing a system with disabled readahead, but I'm
>> sure there are cases where it may not really work - it clearly can't
>> work with direct I/O, ...
>
> Right, for direct I/O everything is slow right now including seq scan.
> We need to start asynchronous reads in the background (imagine
> literally just a bunch of background "I/O workers" running preadv() on
> your behalf to get your future buffers ready for you, or equivalently
> Linux io_uring). That's the real goal of this project: restructuring
> so we have the information we need to do that, ie teach every part of
> PostgreSQL to predict the future in a standard and centralised way.
> Should work out better than RA heuristics, because we're not just
> driving in a straight line, we can turn corners too.
>
>> ... but I've also not been very successful with
>> prefetching on ZFS.
>
> posix_favise() did not do anything in OpenZFS before 2.2, maybe you
> have an older version?
>

Sorry, I meant the prefetch (readahead) built into ZFS. I may be wrong
but I don't think the regular RA (in linux kernel) works for ZFS, right?

I was wondering if we could use this (posix_fadvise) to improve that,
essentially by issuing fadvise even for sequential patterns. But now
that I think about that, if posix_fadvise works since 2.2, maybe RA
works too now?)

regards

--
Tomas Vondra
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