Re: PostgreSQL Tweaking

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 10:27 AM, renier <renier(at)vvconsult(dot)co(dot)za> wrote:
> Hi There.  Is there anyone in the SA PostgreSQL community that is willing to
> assist us.
>
>
>
> We started trials on PostgreSQL just over a year ago, so we used on old
> desktop lying around as our database server, which served fine for testing
> purposes. We eventually bought a new server (2x2.93GHZ Quad core Xeon, 32GB
> RAM, 6x450GB SAS 15000RPM drives etc), quite a decent machine, but the
> performance on this machine is the same, if not worse, than it is on our old
> “server”.  We tried tweaking the postgres.conf file but we do not really
> have enough knowledge of this file and performance does not increase, or the
> service wont start.
>
>
>
> Is there anyone out there with enough experience in postgreSQL tweaking that
> might be willing to assist in some db tuning, and help us learn?
>
> Regards,
>
> Renier
>
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Hi Renier

Firstly, thanks for turning to the mailing list for assistance, it's
great to be getting some traffic.

You say that the server won't start after some of the config changes.
If these are to the shared memory settings then you're going to have
to tweak the kernel's shm_max and shm_all settings (assuming that this
is on a Linux system). The doc at
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/runtime-config-resource.html
gives some good tips on the memory settings.

Exactly which of the bits you'll benefit from tweaking does depend
very much on your workload. Are you doing a lot of sorts, are you
doing a lot of inserts/updates ... ?

Regards

Bell.