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Andres Freund 428b1d6b29 Allow to trigger kernel writeback after a configurable number of writes.
Currently writes to the main data files of postgres all go through the
OS page cache. This means that some operating systems can end up
collecting a large number of dirty buffers in their respective page
caches.  When these dirty buffers are flushed to storage rapidly, be it
because of fsync(), timeouts, or dirty ratios, latency for other reads
and writes can increase massively.  This is the primary reason for
regular massive stalls observed in real world scenarios and artificial
benchmarks; on rotating disks stalls on the order of hundreds of seconds
have been observed.

On linux it is possible to control this by reducing the global dirty
limits significantly, reducing the above problem. But global
configuration is rather problematic because it'll affect other
applications; also PostgreSQL itself doesn't always generally want this
behavior, e.g. for temporary files it's undesirable.

Several operating systems allow some control over the kernel page
cache. Linux has sync_file_range(2), several posix systems have msync(2)
and posix_fadvise(2). sync_file_range(2) is preferable because it
requires no special setup, whereas msync() requires the to-be-flushed
range to be mmap'ed. For the purpose of flushing dirty data
posix_fadvise(2) is the worst alternative, as flushing dirty data is
just a side-effect of POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED, which also removes the pages
from the page cache.  Thus the feature is enabled by default only on
linux, but can be enabled on all systems that have any of the above
APIs.

While desirable and likely possible this patch does not contain an
implementation for windows.

With the infrastructure added, writes made via checkpointer, bgwriter
and normal user backends can be flushed after a configurable number of
writes. Each of these sources of writes controlled by a separate GUC,
checkpointer_flush_after, bgwriter_flush_after and backend_flush_after
respectively; they're separate because the number of flushes that are
good are separate, and because the performance considerations of
controlled flushing for each of these are different.

A later patch will add checkpoint sorting - after that flushes from the
ckeckpoint will almost always be desirable. Bgwriter flushes are most of
the time going to be random, which are slow on lots of storage hardware.
Flushing in backends works well if the storage and bgwriter can keep up,
but if not it can have negative consequences.  This patch is likely to
have negative performance consequences without checkpoint sorting, but
unfortunately so has sorting without flush control.

Discussion: alpine.DEB.2.10.1506011320000.28433@sto
Author: Fabien Coelho and Andres Freund
2016-03-10 17:04:34 -08:00
config Install our "missing" script where PGXS builds can find it. 2015-12-11 16:15:05 -05:00
contrib Refactor pull_var_clause's API to make it less tedious to extend. 2016-03-10 15:53:07 -05:00
doc Allow to trigger kernel writeback after a configurable number of writes. 2016-03-10 17:04:34 -08:00
src Allow to trigger kernel writeback after a configurable number of writes. 2016-03-10 17:04:34 -08:00
.dir-locals.el
.gitattributes
.gitignore Add .gitignore entries for AIX-specific intermediate build artifacts. 2015-07-08 20:44:22 -04:00
aclocal.m4 Replace our hacked version of ax_pthread.m4 with latest upstream version. 2015-07-08 20:36:06 +03:00
configure Add support for systemd service notifications 2016-02-02 21:04:29 -05:00
configure.in Add support for systemd service notifications 2016-02-02 21:04:29 -05:00
COPYRIGHT Update copyright for 2016 2016-01-02 13:33:40 -05:00
GNUmakefile.in Fix distclean/maintainer-clean targets to remove top-level tmp_install dir. 2015-05-13 18:48:05 -04:00
HISTORY
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README
README.git

PostgreSQL Database Management System
=====================================

This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including
transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types
and functions.  This distribution also contains C language bindings.

PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here:

	http://www.postgresql.org/download

See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install
PostgreSQL.  That file also lists supported operating systems and
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system.  Copyright and license information can be found in the
file COPYRIGHT.  A comprehensive documentation set is included in this
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http://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.