This is just a curiosity.
Why is the default postgres block size 8192? These days, with caching
file systems, high speed DMA disks, hundreds of megabytes of RAM, maybe
even gigabytes. Surely, 8K is inefficient.
Has anyone done any tests to see if a default 32K block would provide a
better overall performance? 8K seems so small, and 32K looks to be where
most x86 operating systems seem to have a sweet spot.
If someone has the answer off the top of their head, and I'm just being
stupid, let me have it. However, I have needed to up the block size to
32K for a text management system and have seen no performance problems.
(It has not been a scientific experiment, admittedly.)
This isn't a rant, but my gut tells me that a 32k block size as default
would be better, and that smaller deployments should adjust down as
needed.
