Re: initdb profiles

Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> But I wondered if it might not be a good idea to allow
> an option to initdb which would provide a greater possible range of
> settings for max_connections, shared_buffers and so on. For example,
> we might offer a profile which is very conservative for memory bound

That reminds me of an identical proposal that was rejected years ago...

> machines, medium size for a development platform, large for a server
> running with other server processes, and huge for a decdicated box,
> and then provide some heuristics that initdb could apply. We'd have

And before long we'll have 750 profiles...

> to let all of these degrade nicely, so that even if the user select
> the machine hog setting, if we find we can only do something like the
> tiny setting that's what s/he would get. Also, we might need to have

And degrading nicely was a feature that we removed a long time ago. Now
you get what you ask for.

> some tolerably portable way of finding out about machine resources.

And that doesn't exist.

> And power users will still want to tube things more. But it might
> help to alleviate our undeserved reputation for poor performance if
> we provide some help to start off at least in the right ballpark.

And mind reading devices are not yet available.

So it's doesn't look all that good.

All jokes aside, tuning aids are surely needed, but letting initdb guess
the required profile isn't going to do it.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/