Re: Scalability in postgres - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From James Mansion
Subject Re: Scalability in postgres
Date
Msg-id 4A262700.1070409@mansionfamily.plus.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Scalability in postgres  (Greg Smith <gsmith@gregsmith.com>)
Responses Re: Scalability in postgres  ("Kevin Grittner" <Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov>)
List pgsql-performance
Greg Smith wrote:
>> 3500 active connections across them.  That doesn't work, and what
>> happens
> is exactly the sort of context switch storm you're showing data for.
> Think about it for a minute:  how many of those can really be doing
> work at any time?  32, that's how many.  Now, you need some multiple
> of the number of cores to try to make sure everybody is always busy,
> but that multiple should be closer to 10X the number of cores rather
> than 100X.
That's surely overly simplistic.  There is inherently nothing problematic
about having a lot of compute processes waiting for their timeslice, nor
of having IO- or semaphore-blocked processes waiting, and it doesn't
cause a context switch storm - this is a problem with postgres scalability,
not (inherently) lots of connections. I'm sure most of us evaluating
Postgres
from a background in Sybase or SQLServer would regard 5000
connections as no big deal.

This has the sniff of a badly contended spin-and-yield doesn't it?

I'd guess that if the yield were a sleep for a couple of milliseconds then
the lock holder would run an free everything up.


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