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Discussion (45 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
This seems confused. These are options for preemptibility of the kernel, which is a relatively modern fearure. Userspace could always be preempted and these options do not change anything there. The kernel must in any case frequently interrupt threads and processes to implement preemptive multitasking which Linux of course had since the beginning.
Read more eg at https://lwn.net/Articles/944686/ or help texts at https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/kernel/Kconfig...
Also a crime that people are still running databases with 4kb pages.
To put it in perspective, this means you will have more than 30 million pages on a server with 128GB RAM. As an example, if there is 16bytes of metadata for memory page. The metadata itself would take more than half a gigabyte.
Since we will never know it might be a good idea to feature gate the change, change the default and let users decide to change it back. This may give some feedback on the lkml or else to decide if the change is worthwhile?
It's very close to a real world simulation of a production workload
For example, this issue aside, I'd rather split such a workload into multiple smaller instances, naturally. Because the impact of a crash on this single node, heavy load, many cores, many clients scenario would be huge.
The headline implies it broke PG everywhere. It didn’t.
Though I actually don't know how large shared buffers has to be for huge pages to make a noticeable difference.
It only took a few decades for Linux to get a good CPU scheduler and good I/O schedulers, too. I don't get how such an important area can be so bad for so long. But then, bad scheduling is everywhere. I find it to be a pretty fun area to work in, but, judging by how much it is less than half-assed in much existing software, most developers seem to hate dealing with it?
At first I thought that maybe Linux doesn't have ways to give priority to the desktop environment (a.k.a. "graphical shell") which is why running out of RAM means your cursor starts lagging, clicking on things stops working, etc.
But maybe Linux is just bad at that in general and a single process eating too much RAM can simply bring the whole system to a halt as it tries to move and compress RAM to a pagefile on an HDD (not SSD).
Every time it happens to me I just find it so incredible. Here I am with a PC with a multiple cores, multiple processors, and a single process eating all the RAM can bottleneck ALL of them at once? Am I misunderstanding something? Shouldn't it, ideally, work in such way that so long as one processor is free, the system can process mouse input and render the cursor and do all the desktop stuff no matter what I/O is happening in the background?
Since it's Linux maybe it's just my DE/distro (Cinnamon/Mint). Maybe it does allocations under the assumption there will always be a few free bytes in RAM available, so it halts if RAM runs out while some other DE wouldn't. But even then you'd think there would be a way to just reserve "premium" memory for critical processes so they never become unresponsive.
I wonder if other people have the same experience as me. This part of Linux just always felt fundamentally poor for me.
What if it was on a VM and the core holding the lock got descheduled from the hypervisor?
https://jira.mongodb.org/browse/SERVER-121885
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260126204745.GP171111@noisy.pr...
Doing research though a spinlock actually doesn't seem as unusual a hack as it would first seem, do drivers and the like not have similar issues because they don't trigger a page fault I guess?
[1] https://xkcd.com/1172/
That was idk, 2008-9 -ish? I don't know what spotty history you are talking about, if you have multigigabyte address spaces floating on a machine it's stupid not to use hugepages.
You might have transparent huge pages on by default depending on the distro
Especially with containers around you might very well hit the case of running new kernel but older version of PostgreSQL with no code mitigation for the problem
I can defend someone who is unwilling to yield on quality. Afterall, this truly is his baby. Issuing scathing rebukes to well-intentioned contributors is like slapping my kid when he brings me the wrong type of screwdriver.
You don't talk like this to junior or even senior engineers, but you do reach a level at which gently telling isn't necessary.
If you don't like it go fork Linux and try being the nice benevolent dictator and we'll applaud your success.
Would you be able to point one out?
> to well-intentioned contributors
This is a system used and relied upon by billions of people around the world. Your intentions, while good, are not material to the problem. Put another way we have an endless supply of people with "good intentions" but we don't enjoy the same largess of people with "good skills."