Tom,
> Hmm ... I wonder whether this means that the current work on
> parallelizing I/O (the posix_fadvise patch in particular) is a dead
> end. Because what that is basically going to do is expend more CPU
> to improve I/O efficiency. If you believe this thesis then that's
> not the road we want to go down.
Nope. People who adminster small databases keep forgetting that there
is another class of users with multiple terabytes of data. Those users
aren't getting away from spinning disk anytime in the next 5 years.
Additionally, but making PostgreSQL work better with OS-based FS
optimization, we are well positioned to take advantage of any special
features which Linux, Solaris, BSD etc. add to utilize new hardware like
SSDs. posix_fadvise is a great example of this.
--Josh