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

On 10/21/2016 08:13 AM, Amit Kapila wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 6:31 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Thu, Oct 20, 2016 at 4:04 PM, Tomas Vondra
>> <tomas.vondra@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>>>> I then started a run at 96 clients which I accidentally killed shortly
>>>> before it was scheduled to finish, but the results are not much
>>>> different; there is no hint of the runaway CLogControlLock contention
>>>> that Dilip sees on power2.
>>>>
>>> What shared_buffer size were you using? I assume the data set fit into
>>> shared buffers, right?
>>
>> 8GB.
>>
>>> FWIW as I explained in the lengthy post earlier today, I can actually
>>> reproduce the significant CLogControlLock contention (and the patches do
>>> reduce it), even on x86_64.
>>
>> /me goes back, rereads post.  Sorry, I didn't look at this carefully
>> the first time.
>>
>>> For example consider these two tests:
>>>
>>> * http://tvondra.bitbucket.org/#dilip-300-unlogged-sync
>>> * http://tvondra.bitbucket.org/#pgbench-300-unlogged-sync-skip
>>>
>>> However, it seems I can also reproduce fairly bad regressions, like for
>>> example this case with data set exceeding shared_buffers:
>>>
>>> * http://tvondra.bitbucket.org/#pgbench-3000-unlogged-sync-skip
>>
>> I'm not sure how seriously we should take the regressions.  I mean,
>> what I see there is that CLogControlLock contention goes down by about
>> 50% -- which is the point of the patch -- and WALWriteLock contention
>> goes up dramatically -- which sucks, but can't really be blamed on the
>> patch except in the indirect sense that a backend can't spend much
>> time waiting for A if it's already spending all of its time waiting
>> for B.
>>
>
> Right, I think not only WALWriteLock, but contention on other locks
> also goes up as you can see in below table.  I think there is nothing
> much we can do for that with this patch.  One thing which is unclear
> is why on unlogged tests it is showing WALWriteLock?
>

Well, although we don't write the table data to the WAL, we still need 
to write commits and other stuff, right? And on scale 3000 (which 
exceeds the 16GB shared buffers in this case), there's a continuous 
stream of dirty pages (not to WAL, but evicted from shared buffers), so 
iostat looks like this:
      time    tps  wr_sec/s  avgrq-sz  avgqu-sz     await   %util  08:48:21  81654   1367483     16.75 127264.60
1294.80  97.41  08:48:31  41514    697516     16.80 103271.11   3015.01   97.64  08:48:41  78892   1359779     17.24
97308.42   928.36   96.76  08:48:51  58735    978475     16.66  92303.00   1472.82   95.92  08:49:01  62441   1068605
 17.11  78482.71   1615.56   95.57  08:49:11  55571    945365     17.01 113672.62   1923.37   98.07  08:49:21  69016
1161586    16.83  87055.66   1363.05   95.53  08:49:31  54552    913461     16.74  98695.87   1761.30   97.84
 

That's ~500-600 MB/s of continuous writes. I'm sure the storage could 
handle more than this (will do some testing after the tests complete), 
but surely the WAL has to compete for bandwidth (it's on the same volume 
/ devices). Another thing is that we only have 8 WAL insert locks, and 
maybe that leads to contention with such high client counts.

regards

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