Re: Speed up Clog Access by increasing CLOG buffers - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 09/05/2016 06:03 AM, Amit Kapila wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 5, 2016 at 3:18 AM, Tomas Vondra
> <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> This thread started a year ago, different people contributed various
>> patches, some of which already got committed. Can someone please post a
>> summary of this thread, so that it's a bit more clear what needs
>> review/testing, what are the main open questions and so on?
>>
> 
> Okay, let me try to summarize this thread.  This thread started off to
> ameliorate the CLOGControlLock contention with a patch to increase the
> clog buffers to 128 (which got committed in 9.6).   Then the second
> patch was developed to use Group mode to further reduce the
> CLOGControlLock contention, latest version of which is upthread [1] (I
> have checked that version still gets applied).  Then Andres suggested
> to compare the Group lock mode approach with an alternative (more
> granular) locking model approach for which he has posted patches
> upthread [2].  There are three patches on that link, the patches of
> interest are 0001-Improve-64bit-atomics-support and
> 0003-Use-a-much-more-granular-locking-model-for-the-clog-.  I have
> checked that second one of those doesn't get applied, so I have
> rebased it and attached it with this mail.  In the more granular
> locking approach, actually, you can comment USE_CONTENT_LOCK to make
> it use atomic operations (I could not compile it by disabling
> USE_CONTENT_LOCK on my windows box, you can try by commenting that as
> well, if it works for you).  So, in short we have to compare three
> approaches here.
> 
> 1) Group mode to reduce CLOGControlLock contention
> 2) Use granular locking model
> 3) Use atomic operations
> 
> For approach-1, you can use patch [1].  For approach-2, you can use
> 0001-Improve-64bit-atomics-support patch[2] and the patch attached
> with this mail.  For approach-3, you can use
> 0001-Improve-64bit-atomics-support patch[2] and the patch attached
> with this mail by commenting USE_CONTENT_LOCK.  If the third doesn't
> work for you then for now we can compare approach-1 and approach-2.
> 

OK, I can compile all three cases - but onl with gcc 4.7 or newer. Sadly
the 4-socket 64-core machine runs Debian Jessie with just gcc 4.6 and my
attempts to update to a newer version were unsuccessful so far.

> I have done some testing of these patches for read-write pgbench
> workload and doesn't find big difference.  Now the interesting test
> case could be to use few sub-transactions (may be 4-8) for each
> transaction as with that we can see more contention for
> CLOGControlLock.

Understood. So a bunch of inserts/updates interleaved by savepoints?

I presume you started looking into this based on a real-world
performance issue, right? Would that be a good test case?

> 
> Few points to note for performance testing, one should use --unlogged
> tables, else the WAL writing and WALWriteLock contention masks the
> impact of this patch.  The impact of this patch is visible at
> higher-client counts (say at 64~128).
> 

Even on good hardware (say, PCIe SSD storage that can do thousands of
fsyncs per second)? Does it then make sense to try optimizing this if
the effect can only be observed without the WAL overhead (so almost
never in practice)?

regards

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