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Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 13:31:06 -0600 (MDT)
From: "scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com>
To: Ron Peacetree <rjpeace@earthlink.net>
cc: <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Anyone working on better transaction locking?
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On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Ron Peacetree wrote:
> "Andrew Sullivan" <andrew@libertyrms.info> wrote in message
> news:20030409170926.GH2255@libertyrms.info...
> > On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 05:41:06AM +0000, Ron Peacetree wrote:
> > Nonsense. You explicitly made the MVCC comparison with Oracle, and
> > are asking for a "better" locking mechanism without providing any
> > evidence that PostgreSQL's is bad.
> >
> Just because someone else's is "better" does not mean PostgreSQL's is
> "bad", and I've never said such. As I've said, I'll get back to Tom
> and the list on this.
But you didn't identify HOW it was better. I think that's the point
being made.
> > > Please see my posts with regards to ...
> >
> > I think your other posts were similar to the one which started this
> > thread: full of mighty big pronouncements which turned out to depend
> > on a bunch of not-so-tenable assumptions.
> >
> Hmmm. Well, I don't think of algorithm analysis by the likes of
> Knuth, Sedgewick, Gonnet, and Baeza-Yates as being "not so tenable
> assumptions", but YMMV. As for "mighty pronouncements", that also
> seems a bit misleading since we are talking about quantifiable
> programming and computer science issues, not unquantifiable things
> like politics.
But the real truth is revealed when the rubber hits the pavement.
Remember that Linux Torvalds was roundly criticized for his choice of a
monolithic development model for his kernel, and was literally told that
his choice would restrict to "toy" status and that no commercial OS could
scale with a monolithic kernel.
There's no shortage of people with good ideas, just people with the skills
to implement those good ideas. If you've got a patch to apply that's been
tested to show something is faster EVERYONE here wants to see it.
If you've got a theory, no matter how well backed up by academic research,
it's still just a theory. Until someone writes to code to implement it,
the gains are theoretical, and many things that MIGHT help don't because
of the real world issues underlying your database, like I/O bandwidth or
CPU <-> memory bandwidth.
> > I'm sorry to be so cranky about this, but I get tired of having to
> > defend one of my employer's core technologies from accusations based
> > on half-truths and "everybody knows" assumptions. For instance,
> >
> Again, "accusations" is a bit strong. I thought the discussion was
> about the technical merits and costs of various features and various
> ways to implement them, particularly when this product must compete
> for installed base with other solutions. Being coldly realistic about
> what a product's strengths and weaknesses are is, again, just good
> business. Sun Tzu's comment about knowing the enemy and yourself
> seems appropriate here...
No, you're wrong. Postgresql doesn't have to compete. It doesn't have to
win. it doesn't need a marketing department. All those things are nice,
and I'm glad if it does them, but doesn't HAVE TO. Postgresql has to
work. It does that well.
Postgresql CAN compete if someone wants to put the effort into competing,
but it isn't a priority for me. Working is the priority, and if other
people aren't smart enough to test Postgresql to see if it works for them,
all the better, I keep my edge by having a near zero cost database engine,
while the competition spends money on MSSQL or Oracle.
Tom and Andrew ARE coldly realistic about the shortcomings of postgresql.
It has issues, and things that need to be fixed. It needs more coders.
It doesn't need every feature that Oracle or DB2 have. Heck some of their
"features" would be considered a mis-feature in the Postgresql world.
> > > I'll mention thread support in passing,
> >
> > there's actually a FAQ item about thread support, because in the
> > opinion of those who have looked at it, the cost is just not worth
> > the benefit. If you have evidence to the contrary (specific
> > evidence, please, for this application), and have already read all
> the
> > previous discussion of the topic, perhaps people would be interested
> in
> > opening that debate again (though I have my doubts).
> >
> Zeus had a performance ceiling roughly 3x that of Apache when Zeus
> supported threading as well as pre-forking and Apache only supported
> pre forking. The Apache folks now support both. DB2, Oracle, and SQL
> Server all use threads. Etc, etc.
Yes, and if you configured your apache server to have 20 or 30 spare
servers, in the real world, it was nearly neck and neck to Zeus, but since
Zeus cost like $3,000 a copy, it is still cheaper to just overwhelm it
with more servers running apache than to use zeus.
> That's an awful lot of very bright programmers and some serious $$
> voting that threads are worth it.
For THAT application. for what a web server does, threads can be very
useful, even useful enough to put up with the problems created by running
threads on multiple threading libs on different OSes.
Let me ask you, if Zeus scrams and crashes out, and it's installed
properly so it just comes right back up, how much data can you lose?
If Postgresql scrams and crashes out, how much data can you lost?
> Given all that, if PostgreSQL
> specific
> thread support is =not= showing itself to be a win that's an
> unexpected
> enough outcome that we should be asking hard questions as to why not.
There HAS been testing on threads in Postgresql. It has been covered to
death. The fact that you're still arguing proves you likely haven't read
the archive (google has it back to way back when, use that to look it up)
about this subject.
Threads COULD help on multi-sorted results, and a few other areas, but the
increase in performance really wasn't that great for 95% of all the cases,
and for the 5% it was, simple query planner improvements have provided far
greater performance increases.
The problem with threading is that we can either use the one process ->
many thread design, which I personally don't trust for something like a
database, or a process per backend connection which can run
multi-threaded. This scenario makes Postgresql just as stable and
reliable as it was as a multi-process app, but allows threaded performance
in certain areas of the backend that are parallelizable to run in parallel
on multi-CPU systems.
the gain, again, is minimal, and on a system with many users accessing it,
there is NO real world gain.
> At their core, threads are a context switching efficiency tweak.
Except that on the two OSes which Postgresql runs on the most, threads are
really no faster than processes. In the Linux kernel, the only real
difference is how the OS treats them, creation, destruction of threads
versus processes is virtually identical there.
> Certainly it's =possible= that threads have nothing to offer
> PostgreSQL, but IMHO it's not =probable=. Just another thing for me
> to add to my TODO heap for looking at...
It's been tested, it didn't help a lot, and it made it MUCH harder to
maintain, as threads in Linux are handled by a different lib than in say
Solaris, or Windows or any other OS. I.e. you can't guarantee the thread
lib you need will be there, and that there are no bugs. MySQL still has
thread bug issues pop up, most of which are in the thread libs themselves.
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From pgsql-hackers-owner+M37865@postgresql.org Fri Apr 11 17:34:21 2003
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Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2003 14:32:59 -0700
From: Kevin Brown <kevin@sysexperts.com>
To: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Anyone working on better transaction locking?
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Ron Peacetree wrote:
> Zeus had a performance ceiling roughly 3x that of Apache when Zeus
> supported threading as well as pre-forking and Apache only supported
> pre forking. The Apache folks now support both. DB2, Oracle, and SQL
> Server all use threads. Etc, etc.
You can't use Apache as an example of why you should thread a database
engine, except for the cases where the database is used much like the
web server is: for numerous short transactions.
> That's an awful lot of very bright programmers and some serious $$
> voting that threads are worth it. Given all that, if PostgreSQL
> specific thread support is =not= showing itself to be a win that's
> an unexpected enough outcome that we should be asking hard questions
> as to why not.
It's not that there won't be any performance benefits to be had from
threading (there surely will, on some platforms), but gaining those
benefits comes at a very high development and maintenance cost. You
lose a *lot* of robustness when all of your threads share the same
memory space, and make yourself vulnerable to classes of failures that
simply don't happen when you don't have shared memory space.
PostgreSQL is a compromise in this regard: it *does* share memory, but
it only shares memory that has to be shared, and nothing else. To get
the benefits of full-fledged threads, though, requires that all memory
be shared (otherwise the OS has to tweak the page tables whenever it
switches contexts between your threads).
> At their core, threads are a context switching efficiency tweak.
This is the heart of the matter. Context switching is an operating
system problem, and *that* is where the optimization belongs. Threads
exist in large part because operating system vendors didn't bother to
do a good job of optimizing process context switching and
creation/destruction.
Under Linux, from what I've read, process creation/destruction and
context switching happens almost as fast as thread context switching
on other operating systems (Windows in particular, if I'm not
mistaken).
> Since DB's switch context a lot under many circumstances, threads
> should be a win under such circumstances. At the least, it should be
> helpful in situations where we have multiple CPUs to split query
> execution between.
This is true, but I see little reason that we can't do the same thing
using fork()ed processes and shared memory instead.
There is context switching within databases, to be sure, but I think
you'll be hard pressed to demonstrate that it is anything more than an
insignificant fraction of the total overhead incurred by the database.
I strongly suspect that much larger gains are to be had by optimizing
other areas of the database, such as the planner, the storage manager
(using mmap for file handling may prove useful here), the shared
memory system (mmap may be faster than System V style shared memory),
etc.
The big overhead in the process model on most platforms is in creation
and destruction of processes. PostgreSQL has a relatively high
connection startup cost. But there are ways of dealing with this
problem other than threading, namely the use of a connection caching
middleware layer. Such layers exist for databases other than
PostgreSQL, so the high cost of fielding and setting up a database
connection is *not* unique to PostgreSQL ... which suggests that while
threading may help, it doesn't help *enough*.
I'd rather see some development work go into a connection caching
process that understands the PostgreSQL wire protocol well enough to
look like a PostgreSQL backend to connecting processes, rather than
see a much larger amount of effort be spent on converting PostgreSQL
to a threaded architecture (and then discover that connection caching
is still needed anyway).
> Certainly it's =possible= that threads have nothing to offer
> PostgreSQL, but IMHO it's not =probable=. Just another thing for me
> to add to my TODO heap for looking at...
It's not that threads don't have anything to offer. It's that the
costs associated with them are high enough that it's not at all clear
that they're an overall win.
--
Kevin Brown kevin@sysexperts.com
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From pgsql-hackers-owner+M37876@postgresql.org Sat Apr 12 06:56:17 2003
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Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2003 03:54:52 -0700
From: Kevin Brown <kevin@sysexperts.com>
To: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Anyone working on better transaction locking?
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Shridhar Daithankar wrote:
> Apache does too many things to be a speed daemon and what it offers
> is pretty impressive from performance POV.
>
> But database is not webserver. It is not suppose to handle tons of
> concurrent requests. That is a fundamental difference.
I'm not sure I necessarily agree with this. A database is just a
tool, a means of reliably storing information in such a way that it
can be retrieved quickly. Whether or not it "should" handle lots of
concurrent requests is a question that the person trying to use it
must answer.
A better answer is that a database engine that can handle lots of
concurrent requests can also handle a smaller number, but not vice
versa. So it's clearly an advantage to have a database engine that
can handle lots of concurrent requests because such an engine can be
applied to a larger number of problems. That is, of course, assuming
that all other things are equal...
There are situations in which a database would have to handle a lot of
concurrent requests. Handling ATM transactions over a large area is
one such situation. A database with current weather information might
be another, if it is actively queried by clients all over the country.
Acting as a mail store for a large organization is another. And, of
course, acting as a filesystem is definitely another. :-)
> Well. Threading does not necessarily imply one thread per connection
> model. Threading can be used to make CPU work during I/O and taking
> advantage of SMP for things like sort etc. This is especially true
> for 2.4.x linux kernels where async I/O can not be used for threaded
> apps. as threads and signal do not mix together well.
This is true, but whether you choose to limit the use of threads to a
few specific situations or use them throughout the database, the
dangers and difficulties faced by the developers when using threads
will be the same.
> One connection per thread is not a good model for postgresql since
> it has already built a robust product around process paradigm. If I
> have to start a new database project today, a mix of process+thread
> is what I would choose bu postgresql is not in same stage of life.
Certainly there are situations for which it would be advantageous to
have multiple concurrent actions happening on behalf of a single
connection, as you say. But that doesn't automatically mean that a
thread is the best overall solution. On systems such as Linux that
have fast process handling, processes are almost certainly the way to
go. On other systems such as Solaris or Windows, threads might be the
right answer (on Windows they might be the *only* answer). But my
argument here is simple: the responsibility of optimizing process
handling belongs to the maintainers of the OS. Application developers
shouldn't have to worry about this stuff.
Of course, back here in the real world they *do* have to worry about
this stuff, and that's why it's important to quantify the problem.
It's not sufficient to say that "processes are slow and threads are
fast". Processes on the target platform may well be slow relative to
other systems (and relative to threads). But the question is: for the
problem being solved, how much overhead does process handling
represent relative to the total amount of overhead the solution itself
incurs?
For instance, if we're talking about addressing the problem of
distributing sorts across multiple CPUs, the amount of overhead
involved in doing disk activity while sorting could easily swamp, in
the typical case, the overhead involved in creating parallel processes
to do the sorts themselves. And if that's the case, you may as well
gain the benefits of using full-fledged processes rather than deal
with the problems that come with the use of threads -- because the
gains to be found by using threads will be small in relative terms.
> > > At their core, threads are a context switching efficiency tweak.
> >
> > This is the heart of the matter. Context switching is an operating
> > system problem, and *that* is where the optimization belongs. Threads
> > exist in large part because operating system vendors didn't bother to
> > do a good job of optimizing process context switching and
> > creation/destruction.
>
> But why would a database need a tons of context switches if it is
> not supposed to service loads to request simaltenously? If there are
> 50 concurrent connections, how much context switching overhead is
> involved regardless of amount of work done in a single connection?
> Remeber that database state is maintened in shared memory. It does
> not take a context switch to access it.
If there are 50 concurrent connections with one process per
connection, then there are 50 database processes. The context switch
overhead is incurred whenever the current process blocks (or exhausts
its time slice) and the OS activates a different process. Since
database handling is generally rather I/O intensive as services go,
relatively few of those 50 processes are likely to be in a runnable
state, so I would expect the overall hit from context switching to be
rather low -- I'd expect the I/O subsystem to fall over well before
context switching became a real issue.
Of course, all of that is independent of whether or not the database
can handle a lot of simultaneous requests.
> > Under Linux, from what I've read, process creation/destruction and
> > context switching happens almost as fast as thread context switching
> > on other operating systems (Windows in particular, if I'm not
> > mistaken).
>
> I hear solaris also has very heavy processes. But postgresql has
> other issues with solaris as well.
Yeah, I didn't want to mention Solaris because I haven't kept up with
it and thought that perhaps they had fixed this...
--
Kevin Brown kevin@sysexperts.com
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Neil Conway wrote:
> Furthermore, IIRC PostgreSQL's relatively slow connection creation time
> has as much to do with other per-backend initialization work as it does
> with the time to actually fork() a new backend. If there is interest in
> optimizing backend startup time, my guess would be that there is plenty
> of room for improvement without requiring the replacement of processes
> with threads.
I see there is a whole TODO Chapter devoted to the topic. There is the idea
of pre-forked and persistent backends. That would be very useful in an
environment where it's quite hard to use connection pooling. We are
currently working on a mail system for a free webmail. The mda (mail
delivery agent) written in C connects to the pg database to do some queries
everytime a new mail comes in. I didn't find a solution for connection
pooling yet.
About the TODO items, apache has a nice description of their accept()
serialization:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs-2.0/misc/perf-tuning.html
Perhaps this could be useful if someone decided to start implementing those
features.
Regards,
Michael Paesold
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