Re: Background writer underemphasized ...

In response to Marinos Yannikos <mjy(at)geizhals(dot)at>:

> Hi,
>
> to save some people a headache or two: I believe we just solved our
> performance problem in the following scenario:
>
> - Linux 2.6.24.4
> - lots of RAM (32GB)
> - enough CPU power (4 cores)
> - disks with relatively slow random writes (SATA RAID-5 / 7 disks, 128K
> stripe, ext2)
>
> Our database is around 86GB, the busy parts being 20-30GB. Typical load
> is regular reads of all sizes (large joins, sequential scans on a 8GB
> table, many small selects with few rows) interspersed with writes of
> several 1000s rows on the busier tables by several clients.
>
> After many tests and research revolving around the Linux I/O-Schedulers
> (which still have some issues one should be wary about:
> http://lwn.net/Articles/216853/) because we saw problems when occasional
> (intensive) writes completely starved all I/O, we discovered that
> changing the default settings for the background writer seems to have
> solved all these problems. Performance is much better now with fsync on
> than it was with fsync off previously, no other configuration options
> had a noticeable effect on performance (or these problems rather).
>
> This helped with our configuration:
> bgwriter_delay = 10000ms # 10-10000ms between rounds
> bgwriter_lru_maxpages = 1000 # 0-1000 max buffers written/round

What other values have you tried for this? Have you watched closely
under load to ensure that you're not seeing a huge performance hit
every 10s when the bgwriter kicks off?

I'm with Chris -- I would be inclined to try a range of values to find
a sweet spot, and I would be _very_ shocked to find that sweet spot
at the values you mention. However, if that really is the demonstrable
sweet spot, there may be something we all can learn.

--
Bill Moran
Collaborative Fusion Inc.
http://people.collaborativefusion.com/~wmoran/

wmoran(at)collaborativefusion(dot)com
Phone: 412-422-3463x4023