Re: kqueue

So, if I've understood correctly, the purpose of this patch is to
improve performance on a multi-CPU system, which has the kqueue()
function. Most notably, FreeBSD?

I launched a FreeBSD 10.3 instance on Amazon EC2 (ami-e0682b80), on a
m4.10xlarge instance. That's a 40 core system, biggest available, I
believe. I built PostgreSQL master on it, and ran pgbench to benchmark:

pgbench -i -s 200 postgres
pgbench -M prepared -j 36 -c 36 -S postgres -T20 -P1

I set shared_buffers to 10 GB, so that the whole database fits in cache.
I tested that with and without kqueue-v5.patch

Result: I don't see any difference in performance. pgbench reports
between 80,000 and 97,000 TPS, with or without the patch:

[ec2-user(at)ip-172-31-17-174 ~/postgresql]$ ~/pgsql-install/bin/pgbench -M
prepared -j 36 -c 36 -S postgres -T20 -P1
starting vacuum...end.
progress: 1.0 s, 94537.1 tps, lat 0.368 ms stddev 0.145
progress: 2.0 s, 96745.9 tps, lat 0.368 ms stddev 0.143
progress: 3.0 s, 93870.1 tps, lat 0.380 ms stddev 0.146
progress: 4.0 s, 89482.9 tps, lat 0.399 ms stddev 0.146
progress: 5.0 s, 87815.0 tps, lat 0.406 ms stddev 0.148
progress: 6.0 s, 86415.5 tps, lat 0.413 ms stddev 0.145
progress: 7.0 s, 86011.0 tps, lat 0.415 ms stddev 0.147
progress: 8.0 s, 84923.0 tps, lat 0.420 ms stddev 0.147
progress: 9.0 s, 84596.6 tps, lat 0.422 ms stddev 0.146
progress: 10.0 s, 84537.7 tps, lat 0.422 ms stddev 0.146
progress: 11.0 s, 83910.5 tps, lat 0.425 ms stddev 0.150
progress: 12.0 s, 83738.2 tps, lat 0.426 ms stddev 0.150
progress: 13.0 s, 83837.5 tps, lat 0.426 ms stddev 0.147
progress: 14.0 s, 83578.4 tps, lat 0.427 ms stddev 0.147
progress: 15.0 s, 83609.5 tps, lat 0.427 ms stddev 0.148
progress: 16.0 s, 83423.5 tps, lat 0.428 ms stddev 0.151
progress: 17.0 s, 83318.2 tps, lat 0.428 ms stddev 0.149
progress: 18.0 s, 82992.7 tps, lat 0.430 ms stddev 0.149
progress: 19.0 s, 83155.9 tps, lat 0.429 ms stddev 0.151
progress: 20.0 s, 83209.0 tps, lat 0.429 ms stddev 0.152
transaction type: <builtin: select only>
scaling factor: 200
query mode: prepared
number of clients: 36
number of threads: 36
duration: 20 s
number of transactions actually processed: 1723759
latency average = 0.413 ms
latency stddev = 0.149 ms
tps = 86124.484867 (including connections establishing)
tps = 86208.458034 (excluding connections establishing)

Is this test setup reasonable? I know very little about FreeBSD, I'm
afraid, so I don't know how to profile or test that further than that.

If there's no measurable difference in performance, between kqueue() and
poll(), I think we should forget about this. If there's a FreeBSD hacker
out there that can demonstrate better results, I'm all for committing
this, but I'm reluctant to add code if no-one can show the benefit.

- Heikki