Re: [HACKERS] lseek/read/write overhead becomes visible at scale ..

Hi,

On 2017-01-24 18:37:14 +0100, Tobias Oberstein wrote:
> > assume that it'd get more than swamped with doing actualy work, and with
> > buffering the frequently accessed stuff in memory.
> > 
> > 
> > > What I am trying to say is: the syscall overhead of doing lseek/read/write
> > > instead of pread/pwrite do become visible and hurt at a certain point.
> > 
> > Sure - but the question is whether it's measurable when you do actual
> > work.
> 
> The syscall overhead is visible in production too .. I watched PG using perf
> live, and lseeks regularily appear at the top of the list.

Could you show such perf profiles? That'll help us.


> > I'm much less against this change than Tom, but doing artificial syscall
> > microbenchmark seems unlikely to make a big case for using it in
> 
> This isn't a syscall benchmark, but FIO.

There's not really a difference between those, when you use fio to
benchmark seek vs pseek.


> > postgres, where it's part of vastly more expensive operations (like
> > actually reading data afterwards, exclusive locks, ...).
> 
> PG is very CPU hungry, yes.

Indeed - working on it ;)


> But there are quite some system related effects
> too .. eg we've managed to get down the system load with huge pages (big
> improvement).

Glad to hear it.


> > I'd welcome seeing profiles of that - I'm working quite heavily on
> > speeding up analytics workloads for pg.
> 
> Here:
> 
> https://github.com/oberstet/scratchbox/raw/master/cruncher/adr_stats/ADR-PostgreSQL-READ-Statistics.pdf
> 
> https://github.com/oberstet/scratchbox/tree/master/cruncher/adr_stats

Thanks, unfortunately those appear to mostly have io / cache hit ratio
related stats?

Greetings,

Andres Freund