On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 7:27 PM, Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> Richard Neill wrote:
>>
>> The key issue for short,fast transactions seems to be
>> how fast an fdatasync() call can run, forcing the commit to disk, and
>> allowing the transaction to return to userspace.
>> Attached is a short C program which may be of use.
>
> Right. I call this the "commit rate" of the storage, and on traditional
> spinning disks it's slightly below the rotation speed of the media (i.e.
> 7200RPM = 120 commits/second). If you've got a battery-backed cache in
> front of standard disks, you can easily clear 10K commits/second.
...until you overflow the cache. battery backed cache does not break
the laws of physics...it just provides a higher burst rate (plus what
ever advantages can be gained by peeking into the write queue and
re-arranging/grouping. I learned the hard way that how your raid
controller behaves in overflow situations can cause catastrophic
performance degradations...
merlin