Re: RFC: Allow EXPLAIN to Output Page Fault Information

On Fri, Dec 27, 2024 at 03:15:40PM +0100, Jelte Fennema-Nio wrote:
> On Tue Dec 24, 2024 at 4:52 PM CET, Tom Lane wrote:
> > torikoshia <torikoshia(at)oss(dot)nttdata(dot)com> writes:
> > > I have attached a PoC patch that modifies EXPLAIN to include page
> > > fault information during both the planning and execution phases of a
> > > query.
> >
> > Surely these numbers would be too unstable to be worth anything.
>
> What makes you think that? I'd expect them to be similarly stable to the
> numbers we get for BUFFERS. i.e. Sure they won't be completely stable,
> but I expect them to be quite helpful when debugging perf issues,
> because large numbers indicate that the query is disk-bound and small
> numbers indicate that it is not.
>
> These numbers seem especially useful for setups where shared_buffers is
> significantly smaller than the total memory available to the system. In
> those cases the output from BUFFERS might give the impression that that
> you're disk-bound, but if your working set still fits into OS cache then
> the number of page faults is likely still low. Thus telling you that the
> numbers that you get back from BUFFERS are not as big of a problem as
> they might seem.

I certainly would love to see storage I/O numbers as distinct from
kernel read I/O numbers.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

Do not let urgent matters crowd out time for investment in the future.