Re: Compression and on-disk sorting - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Jim C. Nasby
Subject Re: Compression and on-disk sorting
Date
Msg-id 20060518162245.GJ64371@pervasive.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Compression and on-disk sorting  ("Zeugswetter Andreas DCP SD" <ZeugswetterA@spardat.at>)
Responses Re: Compression and on-disk sorting  (Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org>)
List pgsql-hackers
On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 10:57:16AM +0200, Zeugswetter Andreas DCP SD wrote:
> 
> > 1) Use n sort areas for n tapes making everything purely sequential
> access.
> 
> Some time ago testing I did has shown, that iff the IO block size is
> large enough
> (256k) it does not really matter that much if the blocks are at random
> locations.
> I think that is still true for current model disks.
> 
> So unless we parallelize, it is imho sufficient to see to it that we
> write
> (and read) large enough blocks with single calls. This also has no
> problem in 
> highly concurrent scenarios, where you do not have enough spindles.

AFAIK logtape currently reads in much less than 256k blocks. Of course
if you get lucky you'll read from one tape for some time before
switching to another, which should have a sort-of similar effect if the
drives aren't very busy with other things.
-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461


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