## Problem
The vectored read path proposed in
https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/pull/6576 seems
to be functionally correct, but in my testing (see below) it is about 10-20% slower than the naive
sequential vectored implementation.
## Summary of changes
There's three parts to this PR:
1. Supporting vectored blob reads. This is actually trickier than it
sounds because on disk blobs are prefixed with a variable length size header.
Since the blobs are not necessarily fixed size, we need to juggle the offsets
such that the callers can retrieve the blobs from the resulting buffer.
2. Merge disk read requests issued by the vectored read path up to a
maximum size. Again, the merging is complicated by the fact that blobs
are not fixed size. We keep track of the begin and end offset of each blob
and pass them into the vectored blob reader. In turn, the reader will return
a buffer and the offsets at which the blobs begin and end.
3. A benchmark for basebackup requests against tenant with large SLRU
block counts is added. This required a small change to pagebench and a new config
variable for the pageserver which toggles the vectored get validation.
We can probably optimise things further by adding a little bit of
concurrency for our IO. In principle, it's as simple as spawning a task which deals with issuing
IO and doing the serialisation and handling on the parent task which receives input via a
channel.
This PR adds a component-level benchmarking utility for pageserver.
Its name is `pagebench`.
The problem solved by `pagebench` is that we want to put Pageserver
under high load.
This isn't easily achieved with `pgbench` because it needs to go through
a compute, which has signficant performance overhead compared to
accessing Pageserver directly.
Further, compute has its own performance optimizations (most
importantly: caches). Instead of designing a compute-facing workload
that defeats those internal optimizations, `pagebench` simply bypasses
them by accessing pageserver directly.
Supported benchmarks:
* getpage@latest_lsn
* basebackup
* triggering logical size calculation
This code has no automated users yet.
A performance regression test for getpage@latest_lsn will be added in a
later PR.
part of https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/5771
