Re: Preallocation changes in Postgresql 16 - Mailing list pgsql-general

I did the testing and confirmed that this was the issue.

I run following query:

 create table t as select '1234567890' from generate_series(1, 1000000000);

I commented if (numblocks > 8) codeblock, and see the following results from "compsize /dbdir/" command.

Before my changes:

Processed 1381 files, 90007 regular extents (90010 refs), 15 inline.

Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced  

TOTAL       97%       41G          42G          42G      

none       100%       41G          41G          41G      

zstd        14%      157M         1.0G         1.0G      

prealloc   100%       16M          16M          16M

After the changes:

Processed 1381 files, 347328 regular extents (347331 refs), 15 inline.

Type       Perc     Disk Usage   Uncompressed Referenced  

TOTAL        3%      1.4G          42G          42G      

none       100%       80K          80K          80K      

zstd         3%      1.4G          42G          42G

It is clearly visible that files created with fallocate are not compressed, and disk usage is much larger.

I am wondering if there is a way to have some feature request to have this parameter user configurable..  

On Fri, Apr 26, 2024 at 4:15 PM Riku Iki <riku.iki.x@gmail.com> wrote:

Thank you, I have such a system. I think my task would be to compile PG from sources(need to learn this), and see how it works with and without that code block.

On Thu, Apr 25, 2024 at 2:25 PM Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Apr 26, 2024 at 4:37 AM Riku Iki <riku.iki.x@gmail.com> wrote:

> I am wondering if there were preallocation related changes in PG16, and if it is possible to disable preallocation in PostgreSQL 16?

I have no opinion on the btrfs details, but I was wondering if someone

might show up with a system that doesn't like that change.  Here is a

magic 8, tuned on "some filesystems":

        /*

         * If available and useful, use posix_fallocate() (via

         * FileFallocate()) to extend the relation. That's often more

         * efficient than using write(), as it commonly won't cause the kernel

         * to allocate page cache space for the extended pages.

         *

         * However, we don't use FileFallocate() for small extensions, as it

         * defeats delayed allocation on some filesystems. Not clear where

         * that decision should be made though? For now just use a cutoff of

         * 8, anything between 4 and 8 worked OK in some local testing.

         */

        if (numblocks > 8)

I wonder if it wants to be a GUC.