"Kevin Grittner" <Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov> Thursday 17 March 2011 22:02:18
> Rados*aw Smogura<rsmogura@softperience.eu> wrote:
> > I have implemented initial concept of 2nd level cache. Idea is to
> > keep some segments of shared memory for special buffers (e.g.
> > indices) to prevent overwrite those by other operations. I added
> > those functionality to nbtree index scan.
> >
> > I tested this with doing index scan, seq read, drop system
> > buffers, do index scan and in few places I saw performance
> > improvements, but actually, I'm not sure if this was just "random"
> > or intended improvement.
>
> I've often wondered about this. In a database I developed back in
> the '80s it was clearly a win to have a special cache for index
> entries and other special pages closer to the database than the
> general cache. A couple things have changed since the '80s (I mean,
> besides my waistline and hair color), and PostgreSQL has many
> differences from that other database, so I haven't been sure it
> would help as much, but I have wondered.
>
> I can't really look at this for a couple weeks, but I'm definitely
> interested. I suggest that you add this to the next CommitFest as a
> WIP patch, under the Performance category.
>
> https://commitfest.postgresql.org/action/commitfest_view/open
>
> > There is few places to optimize code as well, and patch need many
> > work, but may you see it and give opinions?
>
> For something like this it makes perfect sense to show "proof of
> concept" before trying to cover everything.
>
> -Kevin
Here I attach latest version of patch with few performance improvements (code
is still dirty) and some reports from test, as well my simple tests.
Actually there is small improvement without dropping system caches, and bigger
with dropping. I have small performance decrease (if we can talk about
measuring basing on this tests) to original PG version when dealing with same
configuration, but increase is with 2nd level buffers... or maybe I badly
compared reports.
In tests I tried to choose typical, simple queries.
Regards,
Radek