Subject: [SPAM?] Re: PG8 Tuning
From: Steve Poe <spoe@sfnet.cc>
To: paul@oxton.com
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
In-Reply-To: <1536.217.45.209.171.1123763001.squirrel@www.gradwell.com>
References: <1536.217.45.209.171.1123763001.squirrel@www.gradwell.com>
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Date: Fri, 12 Aug 2005 08:47:08 +0000
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Paul,

Before I say anything else, one online document which may be of
assistance to you is:
http://www.powerpostgresql.com/PerfList/

Some thoughts I have:

3) You're shared RAM setting seems overkill to me. Part of the challenge
is you're going from 1000 to 262K with no assessment in between. Each
situation can be different, but try in the range of 10 - 50K.

4) pg_xlog: If you're pg_xlog is on a spindle is *only* for pg_xlog
you're better off. If it is sharing with any other OS/DB resource, the
performance will be impacted.

From what I have learned from others on this list, RAID5 is not the best
choice for the database. RAID10 would be a better solution (using 8 of
your disks) then take the remaining disk and do mirror with your pg_xlog
if possible.

Best of luck,

Steve Poe

On Thu, 2005-08-11 at 13:23 +0100, Paul Johnson wrote:
> Hi all, we're running PG8 on a Sun V250 with 8GB RAM and 2*1.3GHz SPARC
> CPUs running Solaris 10. The DB cluster is on an external fibre-attached
> Sun T3 array that has 9*36GB drives configured as a single RAID5 LUN.
> 
> The system is for the sole use of a couple of data warehouse developers,
> hence we are keen to use 'aggressive' tuning options to maximise
> performance.
> 
> So far we have made the following changes and measured the impact on our
> test suite:
> 
> 1) Increase checkpoint_segments from 3 to 64. This made a 10x improvement
> in some cases.
> 
> 2) Increase work_mem from 1,024 to 524,288.
> 
> 3) Increase shared_buffers from 1,000 to 262,143 (2 GB). This required
> setting SHMMAX=4294967295 (4 GB) in /etc/system and re-booting the box.
> 
> Question - can Postgres only use 2GB RAM, given that shared_buffers can
> only be set as high as 262,143 (8K pages)?
> 
> So far so good...
> 
> 4) Move /pg_xlog to an internal disk within the V250. This has had a
> severe *negative* impact on performance. Copy job has gone from 2 mins to
> 12 mins, simple SQL job gone from 1 min to 7 mins. Not even run long SQL
> jobs.
> 
> I'm guessing that this is because pg_xlog has gone from a 9 spindle LUN to
> a single spindle disk?
> 
> In cases such as this, where an external storage array with a hardware
> RAID controller is used, the normal advice to separate the data from the
> pg_xlog  seems to come unstuck, or are we missing something?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Paul Johnson.
> 
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