Re: Group Commit - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Greg Smith
Subject Re: Group Commit
Date
Msg-id Pine.GSO.4.64.0803061921080.5044@westnet.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Group Commit  (Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>)
Responses Re: Group Commit
List pgsql-hackers
On Thu, 6 Mar 2008, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Should we remove these now that we have async commit?
>     #commit_delay = 0                       # range 0-100000, in microseconds
>     #commit_siblings = 5                    # range 1-1000
> They seem unfixable.

commit_delay offers a small but not insignificant improvement for some 
people using the feature under bursty, high client loads.  The useful 
tuning seems to be siblings>[10-20] and a small setting for the delay; I 
usually just set it to 1 which gives the minimum the OS is capable of 
resolving.

That wasn't the feature's original intention I think, but that's what it's 
useful for regardless.  As async commit is only applicable in cases where 
it's OK to expand the window for transaction loss, removing commit_delay 
will cause a small performance regression for users who have tuned it 
usefully right now.

I actually have a paper design for something that builds a little model 
for how likely it is another commit will be coming soon that essentially 
turns this into something that can be tuned automatically, better than any 
person can do it.  No idea if I'll actually build that thing, but I hope 
it's obvious that there's some possibility to improve this area for 
applications that can't use async commit.  If you're going to dump the 
feature, I'd suggest at least waiting until later in the 8.4 cycle to see 
if something better comes along first.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD


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