Message-Id: <200703210122.l2L1Mras015919@contactbda.com>
From: "Jim Buttafuoco" <jim@contactbda.com>
To: "'Dan Harris'" <fbsd@drivefaster.net>,
	"'PostgreSQL Performance'" <pgsql-performance@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Determining server load from client
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2007 21:22:52 -0400
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Dan

Use the following plperlu function

create or replace function LoadAVG()
returns record
as
$$
use Sys::Statistics::Linux::LoadAVG;
my $lxs = new Sys::Statistics::Linux::LoadAVG;
my $stats = $lxs->get;
return $stats;

$$
language plperlu;


select * from LoadAVg() as (avg_1 float,avg_5 float,avg_15 float);

The Sys::Statistics::Linux has all kind of info (from the /proc) file
system.    

Jim

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-performance-owner@postgresql.org
[mailto:pgsql-performance-owner@postgresql.org] On Behalf Of Dan Harris
Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 8:48 PM
To: PostgreSQL Performance
Subject: [PERFORM] Determining server load from client

I've found that it would be helpful to be able to tell how busy my 
dedicated PG server is ( Linux 2.6 kernel, v8.0.3 currently ) before 
pounding it with some OLAP-type queries.  Specifically, I have a 
multi-threaded client program that needs to run several thousand 
sequential queries.  I broke it into threads to take advantage of the 
multi-core architecture of the server hardware.  It would be very nice 
if I could check the load of the server at certain intervals to throttle 
the number of concurrent queries and mitigate load problems when other 
processes might be already inducing a significant load.

I have seen some other nice back-end things exposed through PG functions 
( e.g. database size on disk ) and wondered if there was anything 
applicable to this.  Even if it can't return the load average proper, is 
there anything else in the pg_* tables that might give me a clue how 
"busy" the server is for a period of time?

I've thought about allowing an ssh login without a keyphrase to log in 
and capture it.  But, the client process is running as an apache user. 
Giving the apache user a shell login to the DB box does not seem like a 
smart idea for obvious security reasons...

So far, that's all I can come up with, other than a dedicated socket 
server daemon on the DB machine to do it.

Any creative ideas are welcomed :)

Thanks

-Dan

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