Re: 8.4 open item: copy performance regression?

Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:
> Simon Riggs wrote:
>> On Sun, 2009-06-21 at 10:28 +0200, Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:
>>> I did some limited testing on that but I was unable to measure any 
>>> significant effect - especially since the difference between
>>> wal-logged and not is rather small for a non-parallel COPY (ie in the
>>> above example you get around 6m20s runtime for wal-logged and ~5m40s
>>> in the other case).
>>
>> This is a common confusion for small tests.
>>
>> Non-WAL logged case causes all buffers to be written to disk at end of
>> COPY. This is roughly the same size as the volume of WAL written. In
>> logged case we do not write data blocks, they get written at next
>> checkpoint. So the reduction in I/O is not apparent, since during the
>> period of the test the I/O is about the same in both cases and less I/O
>> in the non-WAL logged case. On longer tests the difference shows more
>> clearly because the data blocks start to migrate out of shared buffers
>> while the COPY is still running, effecting the test results. 
> 
> I was actually testing with and without explicit CHECKPOINTing 
> before/after the load(and also with longer runs) too - the difference is 
> negligible especially with only one process involved.
> I think the difference is simply not that large because we are still 
> mostly CPU bound within COPY on reasonably fast IO-subsystems.

hmm to further demonstrate that I just did some testing(same config as 
before and the 16MB for the buffer) by loading those 60M rows into a 
20GB ramdisk instead of the SAN(with a CHECKPOINT before and after).

this results in the following "improvements":

16384:
wal bypass: 5min40s -> 5min10s (~9%)
wal logged: 6min20s -> 6min8s (~3%)


vmstat 5 output shows that the system is in fact CPU bound (ie using ~6% 
which is more or less a full core on a 16 core box) and not doing 
anything IO-wise.

 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy 
id wa st 1  0      0 19010444 118648 15415684    0    0     0     6 1068 2151 
6  0 94  0  0 1  0      0 18870448 118652 15555204    0    0     0     6 1069 2142 
6  0 94  0  0 1  0      0 18730568 118684 15694872    0    0     0   185 1080 2151 
6  0 94  0  0 1  0      0 18591236 118692 15834516    0    0     0    19 1072 2144 
6  0 94  0  0 1  0      0 18451472 118696 15973532    0    0     0    46 1073 2152 
6  0 94  0  0 1  0      0 18311720 118704 16113204    0    0     0     7 1059 2136 
6  0 94  0  0 1  0      0 18171968 118704 16252944    0    0     0     0 1077 2171 
6  0 94  0  0 1  0      0 18032088 118712 16392300    0    0     0    54 1062 2138 
6  0 94  0  0 1  0      0 17891716 118720 16532060    0    0     0     8 1078 2176 
6  0 94  0  0


So I do think that IO is in fact not too significant for this kind of 
testing and we still have ways to go in terms of CPU efficiency in COPY.



Stefan