Re: PostgreSQL performance on various distribution stock kernels

On Mon, 26 Nov 2007, Damon Hart wrote:

> Fedora 8:
> Linux 2.6.23.1-49.fc8 #1 SMP Thu Nov 8 21:41:26 EST 2007 i686 i686 i386
> GNU/Linux
>
> OpenVZ:
> Linux 2.6.18-8.1.15.el5.028stab049.1 #1 SMP Thu Nov 8 16:23:12 MSK 2007
> i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

2.6.23 introduced a whole new scheduler:
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS2939816251.html
so it's rather different from earlier 2.6 releases, and so new that there
could easily be performance bugs.

> Does your 10K RPM drive 166 TPS ceiling apply in this arrangement with
> multiple disks

Number of disks has nothing to do with it; it depends only on the rate the
disk with the WAL volume is spinning at. But that's for a single client.

> pgbench
> scale: 50
> clients: 50
> transactions per client: 100

With this many clients, you can get far more transactions per second
committed than the max for a single client (166(at)10K rpm). What you're
seeing, somewhere around 500 per second, is reasonable.

Note that you're doing two things that make pgbench less useful than it
can be:

1) The number of transactions you're committing is trivial, which is one
reason why your test runs have such a huge variation. Try 10000
transactions/client if you want something that doesn't vary quite so much.
If it doesn't run for a couple of minutes, you're not going to get good
repeatability.

2) The way pgbench works, it takes a considerable amount of resources to
simulate this many clients. You might get higher (and more realistic)
numbers if you run the pgbench client on another system than the server.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD