Re: Config parameters

Thanks for the information!

Are there any rule-of-thumb starting points for these values that you
use when setting up servers? I'd at least like a starting point for
testing different values.

For example, I'm sure setting a default work_mem of 100MB is usually
overkill - but is 5MB usually a reasonable number? 20MB? My system
does not have a huge number of concurrent users, but they are hitting
large tables. I'm not sure what numbers people usually use here
successfully.

For maintenance_work_mem, I turned off autovacuum to save on
performance, but run a vacuum analyze once an hour. My current database
characteristics are heavy insert (bulk inserts every 5 minutes) and
medium amount of selects on large, heavily indexed tables.

For temp_buffers - any rule of thumb starting point? What's the best
way to evaluate if this number is adjusted correctly?

For random_page_cost - is the default of 4 pretty good for most drives?
Do you usually bump it up to 3 on modern servers? I've usually done
internal RAID setups, but the database I'm currently working on is
hitting a SAN over fiber.

I realize that these values can vary a lot based on a variety of factors
- but I'd love some more advice on what good rule-of-thumb starting
points are for experimentation and how to evaluate whether the values
are set correctly. (in the case of temp_buffers and work_mem especially)

On Tue, 02 Jan 2007 18:49:54 +0000, "Richard Huxton" <dev(at)archonet(dot)com>
said:
> Jeremy Haile wrote:
> > What is a decent default setting for work_mem and maintenance_work_mem,
> > considering I am regularly querying tables that are tens of millions of
> > rows and have 2-4 GB of RAM?
>
> Well, work_mem will depend on your query-load. Queries that do a lot of
> sorting should benefit from increased work_mem. You only have limited
> RAM though, so it's a balancing act between memory used to cache disk
> and per-process sort memory. Note that work_mem is per sort, so you can
> use multiples of that amount in a single query. You can issue a "set" to
> change the value for a session.
>
> How you set maintenance_work_mem will depend on whether you vacuum
> continually (e.g. autovacuum) or at set times.
>
> > Also - what is the best way to determine decent settings for
> > temp_buffers and random_page_cost?
>
> With all of these, testing I'm afraid. The only sure thing you can say
> is that random_page_cost should be 1 if all your database fits in RAM.
>
> --
> Richard Huxton
> Archonet Ltd