Re: [PERFORM] syslog performance when logging big statements

2008-07-09 Thread [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Στις Wednesday 09 July 2008 03:47:34 ο/η [EMAIL PROTECTED] έγραψε:
> On Tue, 8 Jul 2008, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Jeff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >> On Jul 8, 2008, at 8:24 AM, Achilleas Mantzios wrote:
> >>> File sizes of about 3M result in actual logging output of ~ 10Mb.
> >>> In this case, the INSERT *needs* 20 minutes to return. This is
> >>> because the logging through syslog seems to severely slow the system.
> >>> If instead, i use stderr, even with logging_collector=on, the same
> >>> statement needs 15 seconds to return.
> >>
> >> In syslog.conf is the destination for PG marked with a "-"? (ie -/var/
> >> log/pg.log) which tells syslog to not sync after each line logged.
> >> That could explain a large chunk of the difference in time.
> >
> > I experimented with this a bit here.  There definitely is an O(N^2)
> > penalty from the repeated strchr() calls, but it doesn't really start
> > to hurt till 1MB or so statement length.  Even with that patched,
> > syslog logging pretty much sucks performance-wise.  Here are the numbers
> > I got on a Fedora 8 workstation, testing the time to log a statement of
> > the form SELECT length('123456...lots of data, no newlines...7890');
> >
> > statement length1MB 10MB
> >
> > CVS HEAD2523ms  215588ms
> > + patch to fix repeated strchr   529ms   36734ms
> > after turning off syslogd's fsync569ms5881ms
> > PG_SYSLOG_LIMIT 1024, fsync on   216ms2532ms
> > PG_SYSLOG_LIMIT 1024, no fsync   242ms2692ms
> > For comparison purposes:
> > logging statements to stderr 155ms2042ms
> > execute statement without logging 42ms 520ms
> >
> > This machine is running a cheap IDE drive that caches writes, so
> > the lack of difference between fsync off and fsync on is not too
> > surprising --- on a machine with server-grade drives there'd be
> > a lot more difference.  (The fact that there is a difference in
> > the 10MB case probably reflects filling the drive's write cache.)
> >
> > On my old HPUX machine, where fsync really works (and the syslogd
> > doesn't seem to allow turning it off), the 1MB case takes
> > 195957ms with the strchr patch, 22922ms at PG_SYSLOG_LIMIT=1024.
> >
> > So there's a fairly clear case to be made for fixing the repeated
> > strchr, but I also think that there's a case for jacking up
> > PG_SYSLOG_LIMIT.  As far as I can tell the current value of 128
> > was chosen *very* conservatively without thought for performance:
> > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2000-05/msg01242.php
> >
> > At the time we were looking at evidence that the then-current
> > Linux syslogd got tummyache with messages over about 1KB:
> > http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2000-05/msg00880.php
> >
> > Some experimentation with the machines I have handy now says that
> >
> > Fedora 8:   truncates messages at 2KB (including syslog's header)
> > HPUX 10.20 (ancient):   ditto
> > Mac OS X 10.5.3:drops messages if longer than about 1900 bytes
> >
> > So it appears to me that setting PG_SYSLOG_LIMIT = 1024 would be
> > perfectly safe on current systems (and probably old ones too),
> > and would give at least a factor of two speedup for logging long
> > strings --- more like a factor of 8 if syslogd is fsync'ing.
> >
> > Comments?  Anyone know of systems where this is too high?
> > Perhaps we should make that change only in HEAD, not in the
> > back branches, or crank it up only to 512 in the back branches?
>
> with linux ext2/ext3 filesystems I have seen similar problems when the
> syslog starts getting large. there are several factors here
>
> 1. fsync after each write unless you have "-" in syslog.conf (only
> available on linux AFAIK)
>
In FreeBSD 7.0 by default it does not fsync (except for kernel messages),
unless the path is prefixed by "-" whereas it syncs.
> 2. ext2/ext3 tend to be very inefficiant when doing appends to large
> files. each write requires that the syslog daemon seek to the end of the
> file (becouse something else may have written to the file in the meantime)
> and with the small block sizes and chaining of indirect blocks this can
> start to be painful when logfiles get up in to the MB range.
>
> note that you see this same problem when you start to get lots of
> files in one directory as well. even if you delete a lot of files the
> directory itself is still large and this can cause serious performance
> problems.
>
> other filesystems are much less sensitive to file (and directory) sizes.
>
> my suggestion would be to first make sure you are doing async writes to
> syslog, and then try putting the logfiles on different filesystems to see
> how they differ. personally I use XFS most of the time where I expect lots
> of files or large files.
>
> David Lang



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Re: [PERFORM] syslog performance when logging big statements

2008-07-09 Thread [EMAIL PROTECTED]

>In FreeBSD 7.0 by default it does not fsync (except for kernel messages),
>unless the path is prefixed by "-" whereas it syncs.
Sorry, scrap the above sentence.
The correct is to say that FreeBSD 7.0 by default it does not fsync(2) (except 
for kernel messages), and even in this case of kernel messages, syncing
can be bypassed by the use of "-" prefix.
So in our case of postgresql (local0 facility) it does not sync.

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Re: [PERFORM] syslog performance when logging big statements

2008-07-09 Thread [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Στις Tuesday 08 July 2008 21:34:01 ο/η Tom Lane έγραψε:
> Achilleas Mantzios <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > Στις Tuesday 08 July 2008 17:35:16 ο/η Tom Lane έγραψε:
> >> Hmm.  There's a function in elog.c that breaks log messages into chunks
> >> for syslog.  I don't think anyone's ever looked hard at its performance
> >> --- maybe there's an O(N^2) behavior?
> >
> > Thanx,
> > i changed PG_SYSLOG_LIMIT in elog.c:1269 from 128 to 1048576
> > and i got super fast stderr performance. :)
>
> Doesn't seem like a very good solution given its impact on the stack
> depth right there.
>
> Looking at the code, the only bit that looks like repeated work are the
> repeated calls to strchr(), which would not be an issue in the "typical"
> case where the very long message contains reasonably frequent newlines.
> Am I right in guessing that your problematic statement contained
> megabytes worth of text with nary a newline?

Yes it was the input source of a bytea field containing tiff or pdf data,
of size of some 1-3 megabytes, and it did not contain (many) newlines.

>
> If so, we can certainly fix it by arranging to remember the last
> strchr() result across loop iterations, but I'd like to confirm the
> theory before doing that work.
>
>   regards, tom lane



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Re: [PERFORM] max fsm pages question

2008-07-09 Thread Vivek Khera


On Jul 8, 2008, at 3:24 PM, Bill Moran wrote:


If you don't handle this, that table will continue to grow in size on
the disk, taking up space unnecessarily and probably negatively
impacting performance.


s/probably/definitely/

Also, if it was #3 on Bill's list, one thing to do is look for index  
bloat.  Reindex followed by vacuum might help as well.


As for running VACUUM FULL, I find it sometimes faster to just do a  
dump + reload.  A FULL vacuum is really, really, really, extremely,  
slow.



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