Waiting for Postgres 17: Benchmarking with pg_buffercache_evict

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In E110 of "5mins of Postgres" we discuss the "pg_buffercache_evict" function recently committed to Postgres 17, that lets you remove individual pages from the Postgres shared buffer cache. We show how this can be used for testing query performance on a test system, and the impact of double buffering. We also discuss how to flush the OS page cache for a given table to run a benchmark on a query and avoid confusing "EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, BUFFERS)" output.

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📑 What we have discussed in this episode of 5mins of Postgres:

Add pg_buffercache_evict() function for testing - Postgres commit by Thomas Munro
https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=...)

PostgreSQL 17: pg_buffercache_evict() - Blog post by Daniel Westermann
https://www.dbi-services.com/blog/pos...

pg_buffercache — inspect PostgreSQL buffer cache state - Postgres documentation
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel...

fincore(1) — Linux manual page
https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1...

Drop a specific file from the Linux filesystem cache? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questi...

dd: add a flag to discard cached data
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p...

posix_fadvise - POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED advice flag
https://linux.die.net/man/2/posix_fad...