Re: Scalability with large numbers of tables

I'm not an expert.

Turn off tab completion? It's probably scanning through all the possible
table names and the algorithm used is probably not designed for that
number. And with 42000 tables, tab completion may not be that helpful.

Don't use ext2/ext3? There are other filesystems on Linux which perform
decently with thousands of files in a directory. AFAIK ext2 and ext3 don't
allow you to have single large files anyway - also not sure if postgresql
BLOBs will hit those filesystem limits or postgresql splits BLOBs or hits
its own limits first - I'd just store multi-GB stuff out of the DB.

At 01:24 PM 2/20/2005 +0000, Phil Endecott wrote:

>Dear Postgresql experts,
>
>I have a single database with one schema per user. Each user has a
>handful of tables, but there are lots of users, so in total the database
>has thousands of tables.
>
>I'm a bit concerned about scalability as this continues to grow. For
>example I find that tab-completion in psql is now unusably slow; if there
>is anything more important where the algorithmic complexity is the same
>then it will be causing a problem. There are 42,000 files in the database
>directory. This is enough that, with a "traditional" unix filesystem like
>ext2/3, kernel operations on directories take a significant time. (In
>other applications I've generally used a guide of 100-1000 files per
>directory before adding extra layers, but I don't know how valid this is.)