Re: Volunteer to build a configuration tool

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007, Campbell, Lance wrote:

> If everything I said is correct then I agree "Why have
> effective_cache_size?" Why not just go down the approach that Oracle
> has taken and require people to rely more on shared_buffers and the
> general memory driven approach? Why rely on the disk caching of the OS?

First off, it may help explain the dynamics here if you know that until
fairly recent releases, the PostgreSQL shared_buffers cache had some
performance issues that made it impractical to make it too large. It
hasn't been that long that relying more heavily on the Postgres cache was
technically feasible. I think the user community at large is still
assimilating all the implications of that shift, and as such some of the
territory with making the Postgres memory really large is still being
mapped out.

There are also still some issues left in that area. For example, the
bigger your shared_buffers cache is, the worse the potential is for having
a checkpoint take a really long time and disrupt operations. There are OS
tunables that can help work around that issue; similar ones for the
PostgreSQL buffer cache won't be available until the 8.3 release.

In addition to all that, there are still several reasons to keep relying
on the OS cache:

1) The OS cache memory is shared with other applications, so relying on it
lowers the average memory footprint of PostgreSQL. The database doesn't
have to be a pig that constantly eats all the memory up, while still
utilizing it when necessary.

2) The OS knows a lot more about the disk layout and similar low-level
details and can do optimizations a platform-independant program like
Postgres can't assume are available.

3) There are more people working on optimizing the caching algorithms in
modern operating systems than are coding on this project. Using that
sophisticated cache leverages their work.

"The Oracle Way" presumes that you've got such a massive development staff
that you can solve these problems better yourself than the community at
large, and then support that solution on every platform. This is why they
ended up with solutions like raw partitions, where they just put their own
filesystem on the disk and figure out how to make that work well
everywhere. If you look at trends in this area, at this point the
underlying operating systems have gotten good enough that tricks like that
are becoming marginal. Pushing more work toward the OS is a completely
viable design choice that strengthens every year.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD