Home > Archive > PostgreSQL Discussion > October 2005 > Re: Starting PostgreSQL 8.0.4 with more memory [FreeBSD









You are viewing an archived Text-only version of the thread. To view this thread in it's original format and/or if you want to reply to this thread please [click here]

 

Author Re: Starting PostgreSQL 8.0.4 with more memory [FreeBSD
Simon Riggs

2005-10-31, 9:23 am

On Mon, 2005-10-31 at 14:14 +0100, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 12:16:59PM +0000, Simon Riggs wrote:
>
> Is there any particular reason to turn that off?


Well yeh. If things work faster without it, then off it goes - or at
least parameter settings vastly altered.

> You want dirty pages
> written out. Doing them asyncronously beforehand means you don't have
> to wait for it at commit time. It also allows the OS to schedule the
> blocks into a better write order.


Only assuming you have a constant heavy write workload.

>
> Well, it comes down to a thought experiment. Any disk blocks you have in
> the shared buffers will also be in the system cache.


Each have different and independent cache replacement...

> If you give 4GB to
> shared buffers, then there will be 4GB of data in the system cache which
> is not directly useful. So it seems shared buffers should be large
> enough to hold all the info PostgreSQL needs at any particular moment,
> anything else is just wasteful. Getting data out of the system cache is
> not terribly expensive, I timed it at 50 microseconds per page on my
> oldish laptop.
>
> Secondly, you're assuming that PostgreSQLs caching is at least as
> efficient as the OS caching, which is more of an assertion than
> anything else.


Do you doubt that? Why would shared_buffers be variable otherwise?

Best Regards, Simon Riggs


---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 4: Have you searched our list archives?

http://archives.postgresql.org

Sponsored Links





Also available: Server administration forum archive | Web Design forum archive | Software forum archive | Hardware reviews archive | Programming forum archive

Copyright 2008 droptable.com