Re: Tuning Postgres for Single connection use

On 15/04/14 09:46, Nick Eubank wrote:
>
> Any rules of thumb for |work_mem|, |maintenance_work_mem|,
> |shared_buffer|, etc. for a database that DOESN'T anticipate
> concurrent connections and that is doing lots of aggregate functions
> on large tables? All the advice I can find online on tuning (this
> <http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Performance_Optimization>, this
> <http://media.revsys.com/talks/djangocon/2011/secrets-of-postgresql-performance.pdf>,
> this
> <http://www.revsys.com/writings/postgresql-performance.html> etc.) is
> written for people anticipating lots of concurrent connections.
>
> I'm a social scientist looking to use Postgres not as a database to be
> shared by multiple users, but rather as my own tool for manipulating a
> massive data set (I have 5 billion transaction records (600gb in csv)
> and want to pull out unique user pairs, estimate aggregates for
> individual users, etc.). This also means almost no writing, except to
> creation of new tables based on selections from the main table.
>
> I'm on a Windows 8 VM with 16gb ram, SCSI VMware HD, and 3 cores if
> that's important.
>
> Thanks!
>
Well for serious database work, I suggest upgrading to Linux - you will
get better performance out of the same hardware and probably (a year or
so ago, I noticed some tuning options did not apply to Microsoft O/S's,
but I don't recall the details - these options may, or may not, apply to
your situation) more scope for tuning. Apart from anything else, your
processing will not be slowed down by having to run anti-virus software!

Note that in Linux you have a wide choice of distributions and desktop
environments: I chose Mate (http://mate-desktop.org), some people prefer
xfce (http://www.xfce.org), I used to use GNOME 2.

Cheers,
Gavin