Re: 'COPY ... FROM' inserts to btree, blocks on buffer

On Mon, 2005-01-03 at 17:14, Tom Lane wrote:
> Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> > The situation where another backend requests the block immediately
> > before the I/O is fairly common AFAICS, especially since
> > StrategyGetBuffer ignores the BM_DIRTY flag in selecting victims.
> 
> How do you figure that?  StrategyGetBuffer won't return the same buffer
> again (because dirty or not, it'll be pinned by the time anyone else
> gets to run StrategyGetBuffer).  The case we are interested in is where
> someone suddenly wants the original page again --- that is, a page that
> was just about to fall off the back end of the freelist is wanted again.
> I don't see that that case is common, especially not with a reasonably
> large shared_buffer setting, and most especially not when the bgwriter
> is doing its job and keeping the back end of the freelist clean.

Yes, what I was effectively arguing for was to tune for the case where
shared_buffers is still at the default...which is of course fairly
pointless, since the way to tune is just to increase shared_buffers.

...Fully agree with your original suggestion now.

-- 
Best Regards, Simon Riggs