Re: optimization ideas for frequent, large(ish) updates

Josh Berkus wrote:

> 800MB for sort mem? Are you sure you typed that correctly? You must be
> counting on not having a lot of concurrent queries. It sure will speed up
> index updating, though!

800MB is correct, yes... There are usually only 10-30 postgres processes
active (imagine 5-10 people working on the web front-end while cron
jobs access the db occasionally). Very few queries can use such large
amounts of memory for sorting, but they do exist.

> I think you might do well to experiment with using the checkpoint_delay and
> checkpoint_sibilings settings in order to get more efficient batch processing
> of updates while selects are going on.
[commit_*?]

I thought that could improve only concurrent transactions...

> What have you set max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages to? The latter should
> be very high for you, like 10,000,000

good guess ;-) the former is set to 10,000 (I'm not sure how useful this
is for those temporary tables)

> For that matter, what *version* of PostgreSQL are you running?

7.4.1

> Also, make sure that your tables get vaccuumed regularly.

There is a noticeable difference between a properly vacuumed db (nightly
"vacuum full") and a non-vacuumed one and people will start complaining
immediately if something goes wrong there...

> Well, a battery-backed RAID controller with a fast cache would certainly help.

http://www.lsilogic.com/products/ultra320_scsi_megaraid_storage_adapters/320x4128t.html
(RAID-5 with 9 15k rpm drives; at a hindsight, perhaps we should have
tried a 0+1)

> You'll also be glad to know that a *lot* of the improvements in the upcoming
> PostgreSQL 7.5 are aimed at giving better peformance on large, high-activity
> databases like yours.

That's good to hear...

Regards,
Marinos