Re: TOAST usage setting

Zeugswetter Andreas ADI SD wrote:
> 
> > > No, you misunderstood. Bruce was suggesting changing the target to
> 512.
> > > That means if a row is wider than ~2k, toaster will try to toast
> until 
> > > the base row is
> > > ~512 bytes. I would not do that part for 8.3. 
> > 
> > OK, what do you suggest for 8.3?  Attached are my suggestion 
> > to use 512 and a 4k chunk size, which I think means that 2.7k 
> > is the worst values that has a loss of around 25%.
> 
> Oh, so I misunderstood you also. You are suggesting two changes:
> TOAST_TUPLES_PER_PAGE    16
> EXTERN_TUPLES_PER_PAGE    2

Right.

> While I agree, that 2 might be a good compromise with low risc for now,
> I think
> that toasting all rows down to ~512 bytes is too narrowly targeted at
> not reading wider columns.

Well, it is summarized here:
http://momjian.us/expire/TOAST/SUMMARY.html

It made non-TOAST access 2x faster, but TOAST 7x slower, and that seemed
like a good compromise.

> When suggesting a new target, I interpreted you like so:
> #define TOAST_TUPLES_PER_PAGE    4
> #define TOAST_TUPLE_TARGET    \
>     MAXALIGN_DOWN((BLCKSZ - \
>                    MAXALIGN(sizeof(PageHeaderData) +
> (TOAST_TUPLES_PER_PAGE-1) * sizeof(ItemIdData))) \
>                   / 16)
> So we would only toast rows wider than 2k, but once toasting, toast the
> base row down to 512.  

That is certainly not my intent, and I don't see how you would get the
2k number from that macro.  I think you are looking at 8.2 and not CVS
HEAD.  CVS HEAD has:
#define TOAST_TUPLE_TARGET      TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD

> My suggestion would be to leave TOAST_TUPLES_PER_PAGE as is, because all
> else would need extensive performance testing.
> #define TOAST_TUPLES_PER_PAGE    4
> 
> My next suggestion would be to leave EXTERN_TUPLES_PER_PAGE as is, but:
> Split data wider than a page into page sized chunks as long as they fill
> whole pages.
> Split the rest with EXTERN_TUPLES_PER_PAGE (4) as now.
> This would not waste more space than currently, but improve performance
> for very wide columns.
> 
> I can try to do a patch if you think that is a good idea, can't do a lot
> of testing though.

None of this spliting is going to happen for 8.3.  The question what
changes we can make for 8.3, if any.


--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>          http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://www.enterprisedb.com
 + If your life is a hard drive, Christ can be your backup. +