Re: effective_io_concurrency on EBS/gp2

I've tried to re-run the test for some specific values of
effective_io_concurrency. The results were the same.

That's why I don't think the order of tests or variability in "hardware"
performance affected the results.

Regards,
Vitaliy

On 31/01/2018 15:01, Rick Otten wrote:
> We moved our stuff out of AWS a little over a year ago because the
> performance was crazy inconsistent and unpredictable.  I think they do
> a lot of oversubscribing so you get strange sawtooth performance
> patterns depending on who else is sharing your infrastructure and what
> they are doing at the time.
>
> The same unit of work would take 20 minutes each for several hours,
> and then take 2 1/2 hours each for a day, and then back to 20 minutes,
> and sometimes anywhere in between for hours or days at a stretch.  I
> could never tell the business when the processing would be done, which
> made it hard for them to set expectations with customers, promise
> deliverables, or manage the business.  Smaller nodes seemed to be
> worse than larger nodes, I only have theories as to why.  I never got
> good support from AWS to help me figure out what was happening.
>
> My first thought is to run the same test on different days of the week
> and different times of day to see if the numbers change radically. 
> Maybe spin up a node in another data center and availability zone and
> try the test there too.
>
> My real suggestion is to move to Google Cloud or Rackspace or Digital
> Ocean or somewhere other than AWS.   (We moved to Google Cloud and
> have been very happy there.  The performance is much more consistent,
> the management UI is more intuitive, AND the cost for equivalent
> infrastructure is lower too.)
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 31, 2018 at 7:03 AM, Vitaliy Garnashevich
> <vgarnashevich(at)gmail(dot)com <mailto:vgarnashevich(at)gmail(dot)com>> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I've tried to run a benchmark, similar to this one:
>
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAHyXU0yiVvfQAnR9cyH%3DHWh1WbLRsioe%3DmzRJTHwtr%3D2azsTdQ%40mail(dot)gmail(dot)com#CAHyXU0yiVvfQAnR9cyH=HWh1WbLRsioe=mzRJTHwtr=2azsTdQ(at)mail(dot)gmail(dot)com
> <https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAHyXU0yiVvfQAnR9cyH%3DHWh1WbLRsioe%3DmzRJTHwtr%3D2azsTdQ%40mail(dot)gmail(dot)com#CAHyXU0yiVvfQAnR9cyH=HWh1WbLRsioe=mzRJTHwtr=2azsTdQ(at)mail(dot)gmail(dot)com>
>
> CREATE TABLESPACE test OWNER postgres LOCATION '/path/to/ebs';
>
> pgbench -i -s 1000 --tablespace=test pgbench
>
> echo "" >test.txt
> for i in 0 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 ; do
>   sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches; service postgresql restart
>   echo "effective_io_concurrency=$i" >>test.txt
>   psql pgbench -c "set effective_io_concurrency=$i; set
> enable_indexscan=off; explain (analyze, buffers)  select * from
> pgbench_accounts where aid between 1000 and 10000000 and abalance
> != 0;" >>test.txt
> done
>
> I get the following results:
>
> effective_io_concurrency=0
>  Execution time: 40262.781 ms
> effective_io_concurrency=1
>  Execution time: 98125.987 ms
> effective_io_concurrency=2
>  Execution time: 55343.776 ms
> effective_io_concurrency=4
>  Execution time: 52505.638 ms
> effective_io_concurrency=8
>  Execution time: 54954.024 ms
> effective_io_concurrency=16
>  Execution time: 54346.455 ms
> effective_io_concurrency=32
>  Execution time: 55196.626 ms
> effective_io_concurrency=64
>  Execution time: 55057.956 ms
> effective_io_concurrency=128
>  Execution time: 54963.510 ms
> effective_io_concurrency=256
>  Execution time: 54339.258 ms
>
> The test was using 100 GB gp2 SSD EBS. More detailed query plans
> are attached.
>
> PostgreSQL 9.6.6 on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (Ubuntu
> 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.4) 5.4.0 20160609, 64-bit
>
> The results look really confusing to me in two ways. The first one
> is that I've seen recommendations to set
> effective_io_concurrency=256 (or more) on EBS. The other one is
> that effective_io_concurrency=1 (the worst case) is actually the
> default for PostgreSQL on Linux.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Regards,
> Vitaliy
>
>