Re: Some thoughts about i/o priorities and throttling vacuum

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>
Cc: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2003-10-16T05:42:02Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes:
> ... vacuum could throttle
> its own disk accesses by, say, reading 64k at a time then sleeping for
> a fraction of a second.
> ...
> Personally I think i/o priorities give much better leverage.

Pie in the sky is great too ;-).  But there is no such thing as i/o
priorities, at least not in any portable sense.

OTOH I was just musing to myself earlier today that putting a tunable
delay into VACUUM's per-page loop might make it more friendly to
competing processes.  I dunno if it'd work or just be a waste of time,
but it does seem worth experimenting with.

Want to try it out and report back?

			regards, tom lane