Subject: wait event docs

From: Jeremy Schneider <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2019 14:07:14 -0800

The wait event information in PostgreSQL is very helpful for
troubleshooting.  I always reference the PostgreSQL docs first, and when
people ask me about wait events that where I send them first.  The list
of wait events there is comprehensive, but the descriptions are a bit
terse and often use vocabulary that requires some familiarity with the
internals to understand.

AWS created some wait event documentation for Aurora with PostgreSQL
compatibility which takes a slightly different approach.  It's a lot
more words... but it tries to give useful suggestions about how to
improve (or fix) the system when a particular wait event is encountered.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/AuroraUserGuide/AuroraPostgreSQL.Reference.html#AuroraPostgreSQL.Reference.Waitevents

Something like this would be really valuable for open source PostgreSQL
too.  While somebody's personal blog is one solution, it doesn't seem
wholly inappropriate to live on a community resource.  I'd be happy to
seed the content and continue making updates it as I regularly helping
people solve problems on open source community PostgreSQL (and hopefully
others contribute too).

Could we create a new wiki page as a starting point, and we could draft
up and maintain something there for a little while?  Maybe a place like
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Wait_Events ?

If it does turn out to be useful for a lot of people then maybe it could
even get into the PG docs someday.  :)

-Jeremy

P.S. my wiki username is "Jer"  https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/User:Jer

-- 
Jeremy Schneider
Database Engineer
Amazon Web Services

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From: Michael Paquier <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2019 15:50:29 +0900

> terse and often use vocabulary that requires some familiarity with the

(I think that it would be better to avoid cross-posting among multiple
lists.  Please note that I have removed -www and -general in my reply,
keeping -docs because that7s the most meaningful)

> https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Wait_Events ?

That sounds like a good idea, as it is true that the docs are rather
sparse about the meaning behind a given wait event showing a lot in
profiles and what it actually means for your application.  We have a
couple of links from the docs to the wiki, so it could be an idea to
add a link to the wiki in the docs near the wait event table.  more to
the point, this makes me wonder if actually a better place for such
stuff would be a new section dedicated to wait event profiles here:
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/monitoring.html
--
Michael

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From: Bruce Momjian <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2019 17:46:35 -0500

> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/monitoring.html

Agreed, it probably should be in the official docs.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian  <[email-masked]>        http://momjian.us
  EnterpriseDB                             http://enterprisedb.com

+ As you are, so once was I.  As I am, so you will be. +
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