That's indeed way simpler than before. Have you as well looked at the
most simple approach discussed? That would be just roughly replacing
the pg_fsync() calls currently in RecreateTwoPhaseFile() by a save
into a list as you are doing, then issue them all checkpoint.Even for
2PC files that are created and then removed before the next
checkpoint, those will likely be in system cache.
Yes, I tried that as well. But in such approach another bottleneck arises —
new file creation isn’t very cheap operation itself. Dual xeon with 100 backends
quickly hit that, and OS routines about file creation occupies first places in
perf top. Probably that depends on filesystem (I used ext4), but avoiding
file creation when it isn’t necessary seems like cleaner approach.
On the other hand it is possible to skip file creation by reusing files, for example
naming them by dummy PGPROC offset, but that would require some changes
to places that right now looks only at filenames.
This removes as well
the need to have XlogReadTwoPhaseData() work in crash recovery, which
makes me a bit nervous.
Hm, do you have any particular bad scenario for that case in you mind?
And this saves lookups at the WAL segments
still present in pg_xlog, making the operation at checkpoint much
faster with many 2PC files to process.
ISTM your reasoning about filesystem cache applies here as well, but just without
spending time on file creation.
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