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Date:      Sun, 02 Apr 2000 19:55:07 -0700
From:      David Greenman <dg@root.com>
To:        nino@inode.at
Cc:        questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: tuning the vm system / disk cache 
Message-ID:  <200004030255.TAA07463@implode.root.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 03 Apr 2000 04:43:19 %2B0200." <20000403044319.V31173@TK147108.telekabel.at> 

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>On Sun, Apr 02, 2000 at 07:09:52PM -0700, David Greenman wrote:
>>    I'm sure the system is already caching the entire file - evidence of this
>> is the 438M of free memory, which the system would directly allocate from in
>> order to cache the file. The only way I can explain the disk I/O is that there
>> must be some writes taking place for some reason.
>
>You're right (of course). I checked Postgres' data directory and,
>surprisingly, it writes temporary files for every query. Their filenames
>begin with "pg_sorttemp", so the GROUP BY clause seems to be the culprit.
>
>Shouldn't it be possible to get rid of those disk accesses somehow?
>These are very short-lived files, softupdates are enabled.

   -current/4.x-stable might behave better with the recent changes to reduce
async write-behind. It all depends on the nature of the file writes and size
of the file. This area is Matt Dillon's recent domain, so you may wish to
discuss this with him.

-DG

David Greenman
Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project - http://www.freebsd.org
Creator of high-performance Internet servers - http://www.terasolutions.com
Pave the road of life with opportunities.


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