We are trying to use HP CISS contoller (Smart Array E200i) with internal cache memory (100M for write caching, built-in power battery) together with Postgres. Typically under a heavy load Postgres runs checkpoint fsync very slow:
checkpoint buffers dirty=16.8 MB (3.3%) write=24.3 ms sync=6243.3 ms
(If we turn off fsync, the speed increases greatly, fsync=0.) And unfortunately it affects all the database productivity during the checkpoint. Here is the timing (in milliseconds) of a test transaction called multiple times concurrently (6 threads) with fsync turned ON:
I have written a small perl script to check how slow is fsync for Smart Array E200i controller. Theoretically, because of write cache, fsync MUST cost nothing, but in practice it is not true:
# cd /mnt/c0d1p1/ # perl -e 'use Time::HiRes qw(gettimeofday tv_interval); system "sync"; open F, ">bulk"; print F ("a" x (1024 * 1024 * 20)); close F; $t0=[gettimeofday]; system "sync"; print ">>> fsync took " . tv_interval ( $t0, [gettimeofday]) . " s\n"; unlink "bulk"' >>> fsync took 0.247033 s
You see, 50M block was fsynced for 0.25 s.
The question is: how to solve this problem and make fsync run with no delay. Seems to me that controller's internal write cache is not used (strange, because all configuration options are fine), but how to check it? Or, maybe, there is another side-effect?
