Re: Anyone for SSDs?

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Vaibhav Kaushal wrote:
> > On Fri, 2010-12-10 at 18:07 -0800, Josh Berkus wrote:
> > > On 12/10/10 5:06 PM, Daniel Loureiro wrote:
> > > > An quicksort method in
> > > > sequential disk its just awful to be thinking in a non SSD world, but
> > > > its possible in an SSD.
> > >
> > > So, code it. Shouldn't be hard to write a demo comparison. I don't
> > > believe that SSDs make quicksort-on-disk feasible, but would be happy to
> > > be proven wrong.
> >
> > I too do not believe it in normal case. However, considering the 'types'
> > of SSDs, it may be feasible! Asking for 'the next page and getting it'
> > has a time delay in the process. While on a regular HDD with spindles,
> > the question is "where is that page located", with SSDs, the question
> > disappears, because the access time is uniform in case of SSDs. Also,
> > the access time is about 100 times fasterm which would change quite a
> > few things about the whole process.
>
> What _is_ interesting is that Postgres often has sequential and
> random/disk ways of doing things, and by reducing random_page_cost when
> using SSDs, you automatically use more random operations, so in a way
> the Postgres code was already prepared for SSD usage. Surprisingly, we
> had to change very little.

To add to this very late reply, we basically had random methods to do
things (in RAM), and sequential/random methods for disk. By changing
random_page_cost, we favor doing random things on disk.

The big question is whether there are random things we have never
implemented on disk that now make sense --- off hand, I can't think of
any.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +