Re: checkpointer continuous flushing

>>> IMO this feature, if done correctly, should result in better performance
>>> in 95+% of the workloads
>>
>> To demonstrate that would require time...
>
> Well, that's part of the contribution process. Obviously you can't test
> 100% of the problems, but you can work hard with coming up with very
> adversarial scenarios and evaluate performance for those.

I did spent time (well, a machine spent time, really) to collect some 
convincing data for the simple version without sorting to demonstrate that 
it brings a clear value, which seems not to be enough...

> I don't think we want yet another tuning knob that's hard to tune
> because it's critical for one factor (latency) but bad for another
> (throughput); especially when completely unnecessarily.

Hmmm.

My opinion is that throughput is given too much attention in general, but 
if both can be kept/improved, this would be easier to sell, obviously.


>>> It's also not just the sequential writes making this important, it's also
>>> that it allows to do the final fsync() of the individual segments as soon
>>> as their last buffer has been written out.
>>
>> Hmmm... I'm not sure this would have a large impact. The writes are
>> throttled as much as possible, so fsync will catch plenty other writes
>> anyway, if there are some.
>
> That might be the case in a database with a single small table;
> i.e. where all the writes go to a single file. But as soon as you have
> large tables (i.e. many segments) or multiple tables, a significant part
> of the writes issued independently from checkpointing will be outside
> the processing of the individual segment.

Statistically, I think that it would reduce the number of unrelated writes 
taken in a fsync by about half: the last table to be written on a 
tablespace, at the end of the checkpoint, will have accumulated 
checkpoint-unrelated writes (bgwriter, whatever) from the whole checkpoint 
time, while the first table will have avoided most of them.

-- 
Fabien.