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Postgres 17: Streaming I/O for sequential scans and ANALYZE
We discuss streaming and vectored I/O in Postgres 17. This is an important step towards implementing asynchronous I/O in Postgres. In Postgres 17 we do not yet have asynchronous I/O, but we do see a performance benefit from what is essentially a refactoring work around the internal APIs.
future this will allow for actual asynchronous I/O to happen, but in the meantime, just the fact that the internal APIs are now refactored to work with multiple blocks at a time, will already allow some performance optimization in certain cases. And now, the change where some people will see a noticable direct performance improvement on their production workloads with 17, is to use streaming I/O for sequential reads, authored by Melanie Plageman. For example, last year around the time Thomas proposed this new patch series, there was on the Postgres performance mailing list, who was using a zstd-compressed btrfs filesystem, that does not do any I/O merging.
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