Re: Using Small Size SSDs to improve performance?

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 5:09 PM, Nilson <nilson(dot)brazil(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> The prices of large capacity Solid State Disks (SLCs of course) are still
> too high to most of us.
>
> But it´s already possible to find SSDs of small size (8 to 32 GB) today with
> affordable prices and good performance (0,1ms access time and at least
> 150MB/s r/w transfer rate).
>
> So, would it possible to use these Small Size SSDs (S5Ds) as a buffer to
> improve postgreSQL's write performance?
>
> For now, I detected two opportunities:
>
> 1) usage of a S5D to temporarily store the WAL log files until a deamon
> process copy them to the regular HD.
>
> 2) usage of a S5D to store instructions to a make a checkpoint. Instead of
> write the "dirty" pages directly to database files, postgreSQL could dump to
> SSD the dirty pages and the instructions of how update the data files.
> Later, a deamon process would update the files following these instructions
> and erase the instruction files after that.  I guess that MVCC induces the
> spread of writes along the file area, requiring lots of seeks to find the
> correct disk block. So SSDs will produce a good performance in burst
> situation.
>
> I guess these ideas could improve the write performance significantly (3x to
> 50x) in databases systems that perform writes with SYNC and have many write
> bursts or handle large (20MB+) BLOBs (many WAL segments and pages to write
> on checkpoint).
>
> Of course, postgreSQL should be patched to handle, not only with the new
> behaviours, but to handle a possible SSD full.
>
> One solution to (1) could be a fast/main volume scheme. In case of the fast
> volume full condition, postgreSQL should use the main volume.
>
> The (2) solution is more delicate because introduce a new type of file to
> hold data. But, if the gain worths, it should be examinated ...
>
> Well, that´s it.

This is offtopic for -hackers...better -general or -performance. In
fact, there is a long highly informative topic on SSDs going on right
now which you might be interested in reading. The real short answer
to your question is that $/gb is not the only metric, and the current
situation with flash SSD is much more complex than it appears on the
surface (for example, they basically suck without write buffering).

merlin