Thread: Multiple Buffer pools

Multiple Buffer pools

From
Nailah Ogeer
Date:
Hi,
I am currently undergoing the project of making postgres's single buffer
pool into multiple buffer pools hopefully to decrease the number of
physical reads. Just wondering if anyone has done some work on this
before. Also, I need some information on where the number of relations in
the system is defined.
thanks a lot
nailah


Re: Multiple Buffer pools

From
Tom Lane
Date:
Nailah Ogeer <ogeer@cs.queensu.ca> writes:
> I am currently undergoing the project of making postgres's single buffer
> pool into multiple buffer pools hopefully to decrease the number of
> physical reads. Just wondering if anyone has done some work on this
> before.

To be honest, I think this is a complete waste of effort, as the optimal
buffering scheme for Postgres relies on OS-level caching more than
PG-internal caching.  But yes, it's been discussed before.  See the
archives for pgsql-performance and pgsql-hackers.

> Also, I need some information on where the number of relations in
> the system is defined.

There is no very practical way to determine that.  Any one backend can
only see one database, not the entire cluster; and at the time shared
memory is sized, you don't have any database access capability at all.

            regards, tom lane