Re: COPY FROM performance improvements

Luke Lonergan <llonergan@greenplum.com>

From: "Luke Lonergan" <llonergan@greenplum.com>
To: "Mark Wong" <markw@osdl.org>
Cc: "Andrew Dunstan" <andrew@dunslane.net>, "Alvaro Herrera" <alvherre@surnet.cl>, "Bruce Momjian" <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>, "Alon Goldshuv" <agoldshuv@greenplum.com>, pgsql-patches@postgresql.org, maryedie@osdl.org
Date: 2005-07-21T23:14:47Z
Lists: pgsql-performance
Cool!

At what rate does your disk setup write sequential data, e.g.:
  time dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=8k count=500000

(sized for 2x RAM on a system with 2GB)

BTW - the Compaq smartarray controllers are pretty broken on Linux from a
performance standpoint in our experience.  We've had disastrously bad
results from the SmartArray 5i and 6 controllers on kernels from 2.4 ->
2.6.10, on the order of 20MB/s.

For comparison, the results on our dual opteron with a single LSI SCSI
controller with software RAID0 on a 2.6.10 kernel:

[llonergan@stinger4 dbfast]$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile bs=8k
count=500000
500000+0 records in
500000+0 records out

real    0m24.702s
user    0m0.077s
sys     0m8.794s

Which calculates out to about 161MB/s.

- Luke


On 7/21/05 2:55 PM, "Mark Wong" <markw@osdl.org> wrote:

> I just ran through a few tests with the v14 patch against 100GB of data
> from dbt3 and found a 30% improvement; 3.6 hours vs 5.3 hours.  Just to
> give a few details, I only loaded data and started a COPY in parallel
> for each the data files:
> http://www.testing.osdl.org/projects/dbt3testing/results/fast_copy/
> 
> Here's a visual of my disk layout, for those familiar with the database
> schema:
> http://www.testing.osdl.org/projects/dbt3testing/results/fast_copy/layout-dev4
> -010-dbt3.html
> 
> I have 6 arrays of fourteen 15k rpm drives in a split-bus configuration
> attached to a 4-way itanium2 via 6 compaq smartarray pci-x controllers.
> 
> Let me know if you have any questions.
> 
> Mark
>