Re: [HACKERS] Increase Vacuum ring buffer.

On Thu, Jul 20, 2017 at 11:59 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 6:09 AM, Sokolov Yura
> <funny.falcon@postgrespro.ru> wrote:
>> I investigated autovacuum performance, and found that it suffers a lot
>> from small ring buffer. It suffers in a same way bulk writer suffered
>> before Tom Lane's commit 6382448cf96:
>>
>>> Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>  2009-06-23 00:04:28
>>> For bulk write operations (eg COPY IN), use a ring buffer of 16MB
>>> instead of the 256KB limit originally enforced by a patch committed
>>> 2008-11-06. Per recent test results, the smaller size resulted in an
>>> undesirable decrease in bulk data loading speed, due to COPY
>>> processing frequently getting blocked for WAL flushing. This area
>>> might need more tweaking later, but this setting seems to be good
>>> enough for 8.4.
>>
>> It is especially noticable when database doesn't fit in shared_buffers
>> but fit into OS file cache, and data is intensively updated (ie OLTP
>> load). In this scenario autovacuum with current 256kB (32 pages) ring
>> buffer lasts 3-10 times longer than with increased to 16MB ring buffer.
>>
>> I've tested with synthetic load with 256MB or 1GB shared buffers and
>> 2-6GB (with indices) tables, with different load factor and with/without
>> secondary indices on updated columns. Table were randomly updated with
>> hot and non-hot updates. Times before/after buffer increase (depending
>> on load) were 7500sec/1200sec, 75000sec/11500sec. So benefit is
>> consistently reproducible.
>>
>> I didn't tested cases when database doesn't fit OS file cache. Probably
>> in this case benefit will be smaller cause more time will be spent in
>> disk read.
>> I didn't test intensively OLAP load. I've seen once that increased
>> buffer slows a bit scanning almost immutable huge table, perhaps cause
>> of decreased CPU cache locality. But given such scan is already fast,
>> and autovacuum of "almost immutable table" runs rarely, I don't think
>> it is very important.
>>
>> Initially I wanted to make BAS_BULKWRITE and BAS_VACUUM ring sizes
>> configurable, but after testing I don't see much gain from increasing
>> ring buffer above 16MB. So I propose just 1 line change.
>
> I think the question for this patch is "so, why didn't we do it this
> way originally?".
>
> It's no secret that making the ring buffer larger will improve
> performance -- in fact, not having a ring buffer at all would improve
> performance even more.  But it would also increase the likelihood that
> the background work of vacuum would impact the performance of
> foreground operations, which is already a pretty serious problem that
> we probably don't want to make worse.  I'm not certain what the right
> decision is here, but I think that a careful analysis of possible
> downsides is needed.

IIRC, originally, the default shared_buffers settings was tiny.