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From: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
Organization: Aglio Database Solutions
To: "Ivan Voras" <ivoras@fer.hr>, <pgsql-performance@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: go for a script! / ex:  PostgreSQL vs. MySQL
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2003 10:09:26 -0700
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Ivan,

> There was some talk, either on this list or freebsd-performance about
> setting the default block size for PostgreSQL running on FreeBSD to be 16k
> because of performance reasons. That is: *default* for the port, user is
> not asked. So an automagical method to scale non-default block sizes is a
> very needed thing.

Hmmm ... possibly.   My concern is that if someone uses a very non-default 
value, such as 256K, then they are probably better off doing their own tuning 
because they've got an unusual system.  However, we could easily limit it to 
the range of 4K to 32K.

Of course, since there's no GUC var, we'd have to ask the user to confirm 
their block size.  I'm reluctant to take this approach because if the user 
gets it wrong, then the settings will be *way* off ... and possibly cause 
PostgreSQL to be unrunnable or have "out of memory" crashes.

Unless there's a way to find it in the compiled source?

> > 2) may not work well for anyone using unusual locales, optimization
> > flags, or other non-default compile options except for language
> > interfaces.
>
> Depends on what you consider 'unusual'? I hope not things like iso8859-x
> (or, to be exact, European languages) :)

On second thought, I'm not sure what an "unusual locale" would be.  Scratch 
that.

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco