Postgres 9.2 will have many improvements to both read and write scalability.
Simon Riggs and I collaborated on a performance feature that greatly increased the throughput of small write transactions. Essentially, it accomplishes this by reducing the lock contention surrounding an internal lock called
WALWriteLock. When an individual backend/connection holds this lock, it is empowered to write WAL from
wal_buffers, an area of shared memory that temporarily holds WAL until it is written, and ultimately flushed to persistent storage.
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| Original update.sql "new group commit" benchmark, January 2012. This made it into Postgres 9.2. Here, we compare the performance of my original patch (red line) and Postgres master in January (green line). 9.1 performance on this benchmark would probably be very similar to that of the baseline seen here. |
