Re: improvements to pgtune

Daniel Farina wrote:
> It seems like in general it lacks a feedback mechanism to figure things out settings
> from workloads, instead relying on Greg Smith's sizable experience to
> do some arithmetic and get you off the ground in a number of common cases.
>

To credit appropriately, the model used right now actually originated
with a Josh Berkus spreadsheet, from before I was doing this sort of
work full-time. That's held up pretty well, but it doesn't fully
reflect how I do things nowadays. The recent realization that pgtune is
actually shipping as a package for Debian/Ubuntu now has made realize
this is a much higher profile project now, one that I should revisit
doing a better job on.

Every time I've gotten pulled into discussions of setting parameters
based on live monitoring, it's turned into a giant black hole--absorbs a
lot of energy, nothing useful escapes from it. I credit completely
ignoring that idea altogether, and using the simplest possible static
settings instead, as one reason I managed to ship code here that people
find useful. I'm not closed to the idea, just not optimistic it will
lead anywhere useful. That makes it hard to work on when there are so
many obvious things guaranteed to improve the program that could be done
instead.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.us