Re: pg_stat_bgwriter.buffers_backend is pretty meaningless (and more?)

Hi,

On 2022-07-11 22:22:28 -0400, Melanie Plageman wrote:
> Yes, per an off list suggestion by you, I have changed the tests to use a
> sum of writes. I've also added a test for IOPATH_LOCAL and fixed some of
> the missing calls to count IO Operations for IOPATH_LOCAL and
> IOPATH_STRATEGY.
>
> I struggled to come up with a way to test writes for a particular
> type of backend are counted correctly since a dirty buffer could be
> written out by another type of backend before the target BackendType has
> a chance to write it out.

I guess temp file writes would be reliably done by one backend... Don't have a
good idea otherwise.

> I also struggled to come up with a way to test IO operations for
> background workers. I'm not sure of a way to deterministically have a
> background worker do a particular kind of IO in a test scenario.

I think it's perfectly fine to not test that - for it to be broken we'd have
to somehow screw up setting the backend type. Everything else is the same as
other types of backends anyway.

If you *do* want to test it, you probably could use
SET parallel_leader_participation = false;
SET force_parallel_mode = 'regress';
SELECT something_triggering_io;

> I'm not sure how to cause a strategy "extend" for testing.

COPY into a table should work. But might be unattractive due to the size of of
the COPY ringbuffer.

> > Would be nice to have something testing that the ringbuffer stats stuff
> > does something sensible - that feels not entirely trivial.
> >
> >
> I've added a test to test that reused strategy buffers are counted as
> allocs. I would like to add a test which checks that if a buffer in the
> ring is pinned and thus not reused, that it is not counted as a strategy
> alloc, but I found it challenging without a way to pause vacuuming, pin
> a buffer, then resume vacuuming.

Yea, that's probably too hard to make reliable to be worth it.

Greetings,

Andres Freund