Re: [PATCH 00/33] Adaptive read-ahead V12

Con Kolivas
2006-05-27T00:09:36Z

On Saturday 27 May 2006 10:00, Con Kolivas wrote:
> On Saturday 27 May 2006 09:54, Folkert van Heusden wrote:
> > > > These are nice-looking numbers, but one wonders. If optimising
> > > > readahead makes this much difference to postgresql performance then
> > > > postgresql should be doing the readahead itself, rather than relying
> > > > upon the kernel's ability to guess what the application will be doing
> > > > in the future. Because surely the database can do a better job of
> > > > that than the kernel.
> > >
> > > With that argument we should remove all readahead from the kernel?
> > > Because it's already trying to guess what the application will do.
> > > I suspect it's better to have good readahead code in the kernel
> > > than in a zillion application.
> >
> > Maybe a pluggable read-ahead system could be implemented.
>
> Pluggable anything is unpopular with Linus and other maintainers. See
> pluggable cpu scheduler and pluggable page replacement policy (vm)
> patchsets.

Sorry I should have been clearer. The belief is that certain infrastructure
components do not benefit from a pluggable framework, and readeahead probably
comes under that description. It's not like Linus was implying we should only
have one filesystem for example, since filesystems are afterall pluggable
features.

--
-ck