Re: [Patch][WiP] Tweaked LRU for shared buffers

On 2/16/19 1:48 AM, Benjamin Manes wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was not involved with Andrey and his team's work, which looks like a
> very promising first pass. I can try to clarify a few minor details.
>
>     What is CAR? Did you mean ARC, perhaps?
>
>
> CAR is the Clock variants of ARC: CAR: Clock with Adaptive Replacement
> <https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/fast04/tech/full_papers/bansal/bansal.pdf>
>

Thanks, will check.

> I believe the main interest in ARC is its claim of adaptability with
> high hit rates. Unfortunately the reality is less impressive as it fails
> to handle many frequency workloads, e.g. poor scan resistance, and the
> adaptivity is poor due to the accesses being quite noisy. For W-TinyLFU,
> we have recent improvements which show near perfect adaptivity
> <https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/378614/52891655-2979e380-3141-11e9-91b3-00002a3cc80b.png> in
> our stress case that results in double the hit rate of ARC and is less
> than 1% from optimal.
>

Interesting.

>     Can you point us to the thread/email discussing those ideas? I have
>     tried searching through archives, but I haven't found anything :-(
>
>
> This thread
> <https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/1526057854777-0.post%40n3.nabble.com>
> doesn't explain Andrey's work, but includes my minor contribution. The
> longer thread discusses the interest in CAR, et al.
>

Thanks.

>     Are you suggesting to get rid of the buffer rings we use for
>     sequential scans, for example? IMHO that's going to be tricky, e.g.
>     because of synchronized sequential scans.
>
>
> If you mean "synchronized" in terms of multi-threading and locks, then
> this is a solved problem
> <http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/1/25/design-of-a-modern-cache.html> in
> terms of caching.

No, I "synchronized scans" are an optimization to reduce I/O when
multiple processes do sequential scan on the same table. Say one process
is half-way through the table, when another process starts another scan.
Instead of scanning it from block #0 we start at the position of the
first process (at which point they "synchronize") and then wrap around
to read the beginning.

I was under the impression that this somehow depends on the small
circular buffers, but I've now checked the code and I see that's bogus.


> My limited understanding is that the buffer rings are
> used to protect the cache from being polluted by scans which flush the
> LRU-like algorithms. This allows those policies to capture more frequent
> items. It also avoids lock contention on the cache due to writes caused
> by misses, where Clock allows lock-free reads but uses a global lock on
> writes. A smarter cache eviction policy and concurrency model can handle
> this without needing buffer rings to compensate.
>

Right - that's the purpose of circular buffers.

>     Somebody should write a patch to make buffer eviction completely
>     random, without aiming to get it committed. That isn't as bad of a
>     strategy as it sounds, and it would help with assessing improvements
>     in this area.
>
>
> A related and helpful patch would be to capture the access log and
> provide anonymized traces. We have a simulator
> <https://github.com/ben-manes/caffeine/wiki/Simulator> with dozens of
> policies to quickly provide a breakdown. That would let you know the hit
> rates before deciding on the policy to adopt.
>

Interesting. I assume the trace is essentially a log of which blocks
were requested? Is there some trace format specification somewhere?

cheers

--
Tomas Vondra                  http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
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