checkpoint patches

There are two checkpoint-related patches in this CommitFest that
haven't gotten much love, one from me and the other from Greg Smith:

https://commitfest.postgresql.org/action/patch_view?id=752
https://commitfest.postgresql.org/action/patch_view?id=795

Mine uses sync_file_range() when available (i.e. on Linux) to add the
already-dirty data to the kernel writeback queue at the beginning of
each checkpoint, in the hopes of reducing the tendency of checkpoints
to disrupt other activity on the system.  Greg's adds an optional
pause after each fsync() call for similar purposes.  What we're
lacking is any testimony to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of
either approach.  I took a shot at trying to figure this out by
throwing pgbench at it, but didn't get too far.  Here's scale factor
300, which fits in shared_buffers, on the IBM POWER7 machine:

resultsckpt.checkpoint-sync-pause-v1.1:tps = 14274.784431 (including
connections establishing)
resultsckpt.checkpoint-sync-pause-v1.2:tps = 12114.861879 (including
connections establishing)
resultsckpt.checkpoint-sync-pause-v1.3:tps = 14117.602996 (including
connections establishing)
resultsckpt.master.1:tps = 14485.394298 (including connections establishing)
resultsckpt.master.2:tps = 14162.000100 (including connections establishing)
resultsckpt.master.3:tps = 14307.221824 (including connections establishing)
resultsckpt.writeback-v1.1:tps = 14264.851218 (including connections
establishing)
resultsckpt.writeback-v1.2:tps = 14314.773839 (including connections
establishing)
resultsckpt.writeback-v1.3:tps = 14230.219900 (including connections
establishing)

Looks like a whole lot of "that didn't matter".  Of course then I
realized that it was a stupid test, since if the whole database fits
in shared_buffers then of course there won't be any data in the OS at
checkpoint start time.  So I ran some more tests with scale factor
1000, which doesn't fit in shared_buffers.  Unfortunately an operating
system crash intervened before the test finished, but it still looks
like a whole lot of nothing:

resultsckpt.checkpoint-sync-pause-v1.4:tps = 1899.745078 (including
connections establishing)
resultsckpt.checkpoint-sync-pause-v1.5:tps = 1925.848571 (including
connections establishing)
resultsckpt.checkpoint-sync-pause-v1.6:tps = 1920.624753 (including
connections establishing)
resultsckpt.master.4:tps = 1855.866476 (including connections establishing)
resultsckpt.master.5:tps = 1862.413311 (including connections establishing)
resultsckpt.writeback-v1.4:tps = 1869.536435 (including connections
establishing)
resultsckpt.writeback-v1.5:tps = 1912.669580 (including connections
establishing)

There might be a bit of improvement there with the patches, but it
doesn't look like very much, and then you also have to think about the
fact that they work by making checkpoints take longer, and therefore
potentially less frequent, especially in the case of the
checkpoint-sync-pause patch.  Of course, this is maybe all not very
surprising, since Greg already spent some time talking about the sorts
of conditions he thought were needed to replicate his test, and
they're more complicated than throwing transactions at the database at
top speed.  I don't know how to replicate those conditions, though,
and there's certainly plenty of checkpoint-related latency to be
quashed even on this test - a problem which these patches apparently
do little if anything to address.

So my feeling is that it's premature to change anything here and we
should punt any changes in this area to 9.3.

Thoughts?

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company