Re: ext4 finally doing the right thing

Jeff Davis wrote:
>
>> On one side, we might finally be
>> able to use regular drives with their caches turned on safely, taking
>> advantage of the cache for other writes while doing the right thing with
>> the database writes.
>>
>
> That could be good news. What's your opinion on the practical
> performance impact? If it doesn't need to be fsync'd, the kernel
> probably shouldn't have written it to the disk yet anyway, right (I'm
> assuming here that the OS buffer cache is much larger than the disk
> write cache)?
>

I know they just tweaked this area recently so this may be a bit out of
date, but kernels starting with 2.6.22 allow you to get up to 10% of
memory dirty before getting really aggressive about writing things out,
with writes starting to go heavily at 5%. So even with a 1GB server,
you could easily find 100MB of data sitting in the kernel buffer cache
ahead of a database write that needs to hit disc. Once you start
considering the case with modern hardware, where even my desktop has 8GB
of RAM and most serious servers I see have 32GB, you can easily have
gigabytes of such data queued in front of the write that now needs to
hit the platter.

The dream is that a proper barrier implementation will then shuffle your
important write to the front of that queue, without waiting for
everything else to clear first. The exact performance impact depends on
how many non-database writes happen. But even on a dedicated database
disk, it should still help because there are plenty of non-sync'd writes
coming out the background writer via its routine work and the checkpoint
writes. And the ability to fully utilize the write cache on the
individual drives, on commodity hardware, without risking database
corruption would make life a lot easier.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support
greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com www.2ndQuadrant.com