Re: Parallel Seq Scan vs kernel read ahead

On Fri, May 22, 2020 at 10:00 AM David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 21 May 2020 at 17:06, David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com> wrote:
> > For the patch. I know you just put it together quickly, but I don't
> > think you can do that ramp up the way you have. It looks like there's
> > a risk of torn reads and torn writes and I'm unsure how much that
> > could affect the test results here.
>
> Oops. On closer inspection, I see that memory is per worker, not
> global to the scan.

Right, I think it's safe.  I think you were probably right that
ramp-up isn't actually useful though, it's only the end of the scan
that requires special treatment so we don't get unfair allocation as
the work runs out, due to course grain.  I suppose that even if you
have a scheme that falls back to fine grained allocation for the final
N pages, it's still possible that a highly distracted process (most
likely the leader given its double duties) can finish up sitting on a
large range of pages and eventually have to process them all at the
end after the other workers have already knocked off and gone for a
pint.