Theory questions about ovdb

[Heath Kehoe]

>I did not do a good job asking the separate questions,
>so I think you misunderstood they were all related.
>
>
>In the question about retries, I wrote:
>
>>Does it make sense to add a retry limit and failure with log
>>(such as in ovdb_groupadd() and elsewhere.)  How often
>>in real life circumstances does a retry get needed?  Right
>>now it looks like it could infinite loop.
>
>By retry, I meant the places in ovdb.c where there is
>a "goto retry"  
>

Ah, I see... I havn't measured retries; but I have never observed
the code getting stuck in a retry loop.  It may still be possible,
though.  I will put in some code to count and report retries, and
enforce a retry limit.


>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Unrelated to the question about retries, I was trying to understand
>the performance implications of 
>
>  key.data = &dk;
>  key.size = sizeof dk;
>  val.flags = DB_DBT_PARTIAL;
>  ret = dbcursor->c_get(dbcursor, &key, &val, DB_SET_RANGE)) {
>  loop
>    ret = dbcursor->c_get(dbcursor, &key, &val, DB_NEXT);
>
>Is it O(1)?  (I hope!)
>
>Since it is a B-tree, keys are sorted, so that answers
>my question I guess: that iteration should be O(1), unless
>there is something tricky about the keys and data are
>stored separately.  Hope I understand it....
>

AFAIK, each iteration is O(1).


>------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Thanks for adding the note about expected performance.  For a
>good point of comparison can you also add 
>
>   How many articles per day to you store into overview.
>
>   How many simultaneous reader connections you see.
>

About 300k-450k articles per day; usually don't have more than
15 or 20 simultaneous readers.  This is from a recent news.daily
report:

INND timer:
Code region              Time    Pct    Invoked   Min(ms)    Avg(ms)    Max(ms)
article cancel   00:04:38.498   0.3%      28439     0.556      9.793    150.385
article control  00:04:36.053   0.3%      27869     0.500      9.905    192.300
article link     00:00:00.000   0.0%          0     0.000      0.000      0.000
article write    00:56:44.871   3.9%     329610     4.551     10.330     38.375
history grep     00:01:04.433   0.1%      24582     0.000      2.621     54.700
history lookup   00:09:01.394   0.6%    2014810     0.027      0.269      7.886
history sync     00:00:08.415   0.0%      27281     0.114      0.308      2.565
history write    01:12:56.162   5.1%     542363     3.998      8.069     26.562
idle             10:42:42.711  44.6%    6675025     2.375      5.777     22.248
overview write   00:58:56.600   4.1%     329610     5.534     10.730     48.734
perl filter      05:33:11.631  23.1%     536458    14.620     37.266    126.338
site send        00:14:00.303   1.0%    1085179     0.600      0.774      1.324

-heath