Re: VACUUM delay (was Re: What's planned for 7.5?)

Stephen wrote:

> The vacuum delay patch is not the ideal solution but it worked like a charm
> on my servers. I really need the vacuum delay patch or a better solution in
> 7.5. I'm getting millions of requests a month and running VACUUM without the
> patch makes PostgreSQL useless for many consecutive hours. Not quite the
> 24/7 system I was hopping for. :-(
>
> Unfortunately, it's rather difficult to patch so many machines as my entire
> system runs on Redhat RPMs. I'm really hopping to see a solution to this
> VACUUM problem in 7.5. I've been waiting for this fix for over 3 years and
> now it's almost there.
>
> Will this problem get addressed in the not so official TODO list?

Well, I had a few different "versions" of vacuum delay stuff out as
patches, together with ARC and the beginnings of the background writer.
Instead of getting some numbers on those, the whole discussion got stuck
in differences about how we actually let the background writer tell the
kernel "do something" ... the whole sync(), fsync(), fdatasync(),
fadvise() discussion.

I don't have the time to make enough different attempts to find the one
that pleases all. My argument still is that all this IO throttling and
IO optimizing is mainly needed for dedicated servers, because I think
that if you still run multiple services on one box you're not really in
trouble yet. So in the first round a configurable sync() approach would
do. So far nobody even agreed to that.

I currently have better to do. We do not have a big IO problem, we have
other problems, and I spend my time on solving them. If someone wants to
pick up the IO throttle problem, I am allways here to help, but I will
not waste my time with making patches nobody even gives a try.

>
> Thanks and keep up the good work!

Sorry for the venting, but I needed that out.

Jan

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