Re: performance degradation on kernel upgrade (due to commit ab0a9735e06914ce4d2a94ffa41497dbc142fe7f)

[Jagdish Motwani]

On 09/21/2012 07:55 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Friday, September 21, 2012 03:47:56 PM Jagdish Motwani wrote:
> > Recently i upgraded my kernel from 2.6.29.6 to 2.6.35.14.
> >
> > After upgrading i got very poor performance on my postgre database.
> >
> >
> > My test.sql contains 10000 postgre insert query
> >
> >
> > Linux  2.6.29.6
> >
> > time psql -U user -d database -f test.sql  > /dev/null
> > real    0m 7.23s
> > user    0m 0.38s
> > sys     0m 0.12s
> >
> >
> >
> > Linux  2.6.35.14
> >
> > # time psql -U user -d database -f test.sql  > /dev/null
> > real    1m 4.05s
> > user    0m 0.44s
> > sys    0m 0.12
> How do the results to this look if you use psql -1/--single-transaction?
Using single transaction solves the problem - but that's not what i 
really want.
> > I even tried Linux 3.5.4 and got similar results.
> >
> > Using git bisect, i got commit ab0a9735e06914ce4d2a94ffa41497dbc142fe7f
> >
> > Is it a behavior change or am i missing something? Are there any
> > workarounds for this?
> I guess youre using some form of virtualization? I think what youre observing
> is just that access via raw devices previously lied about consistency. As the
> commit observes several virtualization solutions can use raw device access.
>
> If all those 10000 inserts above happen in individual transactions - which
> would happen if youre not using transactions explicitly -  each and every one
> of them will cause a single disk write if they are executed sequentially.
> A typical rotating disks can do between 80-160 such writes. If you devide 10k
> transactions by 150 synchronous writes a second you get ~66s which pretty
> nicely fits your time above.
>
> If you don't care about loosing a very small amount of transactions (up to a
> second with the default settings) you can disable the synchronous_commit
> setting in postgres. No earlier commits/changes will be lost/corrupted.
> You can change that setting per transaction, per session/connection, per user,
> per database or globally.
>
> Greetings,
>
> Andres
Thanks Andres,

I disabled synchronous_commit, and got results similar to 2.6.32.

Regards,
Jagdish Motwani
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