Fun little performance IMPROVEMENT...

I was doing a little testing to see how machine load affected the
performance of different types of queries, index range scans, hash joins,
full scans, a mix, etc.

In order to do this, I isolated different performance hits, spinning only
CPU, loading the disk to create high I/O wait states, and using most of
the physical memory.   This was on a 4 CPU Xen virtual machine running
8.1.22 on CENTOS.


Here is the fun part.   When running 8 threads spinning calculating square
roots (using the stress package), the full scan returned consistently 60%
faster than the machine with no load.   It was returning 44,000 out of
5,000,000 rows.   Here is the explain analyze.   I am hoping that this
triggers something (I can run more tests as needed) that can help us make
it always better.

Idling:
                                                         QUERY PLAN

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Seq Scan on schedule_details  (cost=0.00..219437.90 rows=81386 width=187)
(actual time=0.053..2915.966 rows=44320 loops=1)
   Filter: (schedule_type = '5X'::bpchar)
 Total runtime: 2986.764 ms

Loaded:
                                                         QUERY PLAN

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Seq Scan on schedule_details  (cost=0.00..219437.90 rows=81386 width=187)
(actual time=0.034..1698.068 rows=44320 loops=1)
   Filter: (schedule_type = '5X'::bpchar)
 Total runtime: 1733.084 ms