[HACKERS] Anyone interested in improving postgresql scaling?

Tom Lane tgl at sss.pgh.pa.us
Tue Apr 10 19:52:01 UTC 2007


Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> writes:
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2007 at 02:46:56PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Oh, I'm sure the BSD kernel acts as you describe.  But Mark's point is
>> that Postgres never has more than one process waiting on any particular
>> SysV semaphore, and so the problem doesn't really affect us.

> To be clear, some behaviour that postgresql does with sysv semaphores
> causes wakeups of many processes at once.  i.e. if you have 20
> clients, you will get up to 20 wakeups.  I haven't studied the precise
> cause of this, but it is empirically true.  This is the scaling
> problem I described, and it's what mux's patch addresses.

[ shrug... ]  To the extent that that happens, it's Postgres' own issue,
and no amount of kernel rejiggering will change it.  But I certainly
have no objection to a patch that fixes the kernel behavior ...

			regards, tom lane


More information about the freebsd-performance mailing list