Re: Postgresql and resource isolation

On 11/15/07, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:

> Well I know that FreeBSD through Jails and Linux through Xen can give
> you fine grained control over how much resources a particular instance
> can use.

I hadn't seen the new limits in jail, the CPU limiting in particular
is neat. I'm not familiar with Xen's capabilities, but neither one
will actually work for this scenario, since both can only contain an
entire database cluster. In order to get per-session resource
throttiling, it would at least need to support limits on a per-process
basis. Per-user would require grouping several postgres processes,
although this doesn't seem to be as pressing a need (limit number of
connections instead, etc). There doesn't seem to be an answer to I/O
throttling either.

Even if an OS does supply these capabilities, it would seem to require
cooperation from postgres.

> My understanding is that Solaris Zones also give you quite a bit of
> control but someone else would have to comment on that.

I'd be interested in hearing about Solaris too, it seems to get a lot
of neat capabilities that don't show up elsewhere.