Berkeley DB Reference Guide: Access Methods

Selecting a page size

The size of the pages used in the underlying database can be specified by calling the DB->set_pagesize method. The minimum page size is 512 bytes and the maximum page size is 64K bytes, and must be a power of two. If no page size is specified by the application, a page size is selected based on the underlying filesystem I/O block size. (A page size selected in this way has a lower limit of 512 bytes and an upper limit of 16K bytes.)

There are several issues to consider when selecting a pagesize: overflow record sizes, locking, I/O efficiency, and recoverability.

First, the page size implicitly sets the size of an overflow record. Overflow records are key or data items that are too large to fit on a normal database page because of their size, and are therefore stored in overflow pages. Overflow pages are pages that exist outside of the normal database structure. For this reason, there is often a significant performance penalty associated with retrieving or modifying overflow records. Selecting a page size that is too small, and which forces the creation of large numbers of overflow pages, can seriously impact the performance of an application.

Second, in the Btree, Hash and Recno access methods, the finest-grained lock that Berkeley DB acquires is for a page. (The Queue access method generally acquires record-level locks rather than page-level locks.) Selecting a page size that is too large, and which causes threads or processes to wait because other threads of control are accessing or modifying records on the same page, can impact the performance of your application.

Third, the page size specifies the granularity of I/O from the database to the operating system. Berkeley DB will give a page-sized unit of bytes to the operating system to be scheduled for reading/writing from/to the disk. For many operating systems, there is an internal block size which is used as the granularity of I/O from the operating system to the disk. Generally, it will be more efficient for Berkeley DB to write filesystem-sized blocks to the operating system and for the operating system to write those same blocks to the disk.

Selecting a database page size smaller than the filesystem block size may cause the operating system to coalesce or otherwise manipulate Berkeley DB pages and can impact the performance of your application. When the page size is smaller than the filesystem block size and a page written by Berkeley DB is not found in the operating system's cache, the operating system may be forced to read a block from the disk, copy the page into the block it read, and then write out the block to disk, rather than simply writing the page to disk. Additionally, as the operating system is reading more data into its buffer cache than is strictly necessary to satisfy each Berkeley DB request for a page, the operating system buffer cache may be wasting memory.

Alternatively, selecting a page size larger than the filesystem block size may cause the operating system to read more data than necessary. On some systems, reading filesystem blocks sequentially may cause the operating system to begin performing read-ahead. If requesting a single database page implies reading enough filesystem blocks to satisfy the operating system's criteria for read-ahead, the operating system may do more I/O than is required.

Fourth, when using the Berkeley DB Transactional Data Store product, the page size may affect the errors from which your database can recover See Berkeley DB Recoverability for more information.

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