Re: Experimental patch for inter-page delay in VACUUM

Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Having another process do the writing does allow some paralellism, but
> people don't seem to care of buffers having to be read in from the
> kernel buffer cache, so what big benefit do we get by having someone
> else write into the kernel buffer cache, except allowing a central place
> to fsync, and is it worth it considering that it might be impossible to
> configure a system where the writer process can keep up with all the
> backends?

This might be far fetched, but I wonder if having a writer process opens 
up the possibility of running PostgreSQL in a cluster? I'm thinking of 
two servers, mounted to the same data volume, and some kind of 
coordination between the writer processes. Anyone know if this is 
similar to how Oracle handles RAC?

Joe