Re: [PING] [PATCH v2] parallel pg_restore: avoid disk seeks when jumping short distance forward

Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>

From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis@gmx.net>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2025-06-11T21:14:53Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Wed, Jun 11, 2025 at 12:32:58AM +0200, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
> Thank you for benchmarking! Before answering in more depth, I'm curious,
> what read-seek pattern do you see on the system call level (as shown by
> strace)? In pg_restore it was a constant loop of read(4K)-lseek(8-16K).

For fseeko(), sizes less than 4096 produce a repeating pattern of read()
calls followed by approximately (4096 / size) lseek() calls.  For greater
sizes, it's just a stream of lseek().  For fread(), sizes less than 4096
produce a stream of read(fd, "...", 4096), and for greater sizes, the only
difference is that the last argument is the size.

-- 
nathan



Commits

  1. Avoid short seeks in pg_restore.

  2. Don't rely on zlib's gzgetc() macro.

  3. Add more TAP test coverage for pg_dump.

  4. Split 002_pg_dump.pl into two test files.

  5. Align the data block sizes of pg_dump's various compression modes.

  6. Fix serious performance problems in LZ4Stream_read_internal.

  7. Fix poor buffering logic in pg_dump's lz4 and zstd compression code.

  8. Fix issue with reading zero bytes in Gzip_read.

  9. Restore test coverage of LZ4Stream_gets().