Re: In praise of auto space management

Nuno Souto <nsouto_at_optushome.com.au.nospam> wrote:
>In article <agkq46$gv5$1_at_lust.ihug.co.nz>, you said (and I quote):
>>
>> Do an insert. You get assigned to one of the free lists, and Lo! your new
>> record is inserted into block 6 -because you got assigned to freelist 2.
>
>Understood. But presumably (and this is a big *if*, here!), I'd expect
>that subsequent inserts would hit the first freelist - the one managing
>the first 5 blocks - as much as they hit the second one? So I'd end up
>at most with a small number of unused blocks in a large table, no?

I'd expect that on average each freelist would be half used, so 2.5 blocks of allocated but unused space per freelist.

This doesn't really start adding up until you have insane numbers of freelists.

-- 
Andrew Mobbs - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~andrewm/