Re: Load experimentation

On 12/07/2009 12:12 PM, Ben Brehmer wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I'm in the process of loading a massive amount of data (500 GB). After
> some initial timings, I'm looking at 260 hours to load the entire 500GB.
> 10 days seems like an awfully long time so I'm searching for ways to
> speed this up. The load is happening in the Amazon cloud (EC2), on a
> m1.large instance:
> -7.5 GB memory
> -4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
> -64-bit platform
>
>
> So far I have modified my postgresql.conf file (PostgreSQL 8.1.3). The
> modifications I have made are as follows:
>
> shared_buffers = 786432
> work_mem = 10240
> maintenance_work_mem = 6291456
> max_fsm_pages = 3000000
> wal_buffers = 2048
> checkpoint_segments = 200
> checkpoint_timeout = 300
> checkpoint_warning = 30
> autovacuum = off
>
>
> There are a variety of instance types available in the Amazon cloud
> (http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/), including high memory and
> high CPU. High memory instance types come with 34GB or 68GB of memory.
> High CPU instance types have a lot less memory (7GB max) but up to 8
> virtual cores. I am more than willing to change to any of the other
> instance types.
>
> Also, there is nothing else happening on the loading server. It is
> completely dedicated to the load.
>
> Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ben
>

I'm kind of curious, how goes the load? Is it done yet? Still looking at days'n'days to finish?

I was thinking... If the .sql files are really nicely formatted, it would not be too hard to whip up a perl script to run as a filter to change the statements into copy's.

Each file would have to only fill one table, and only contain inserts, and all the insert statements would have to set the same fields. (And I'm sure there could be other problems).

Also, just for the load, did you disable fsync?

-Andy