On Jun 21, 2007, at 5:16 AM, Bruce McAlister wrote:

Thats exactly what I think. There is something strange going on. At the
moment I think it is the disk I am writing the data to that is slow,
possibly due to the fact that it is mounted up as "forcedirectio", so as not to interfere with the file system cache which we want to have mainly
pg datafiles in, and the RAID controller has this particular logical
driver configured as write-through, so there is no buffering in- between.
The cpu's and network are not the problem here (2 x Dual Core Opterons
and Quad Gigabit Ethernet, total cpu usage is around 10%, NIC's are
pushing around 3Mbit/s over each).

It's not all that big to be honest, the total database size is around
11GB and I'm currently recking my head to find out how to improve the
backup times, and not adversely affect our running instance. I just
recently tried to use UFS snapshots, but the backing store filled up
before i could complete a backup of the snapshot. I need to find a way
to improve the write speed of our destination disk. I have another
question in this pg group about autovacuum that is not running on one of
our database tables which adds an average of around 2.1GB of bloat to
the database each day. I've now (today) scheduled a cron job every 10
minutes to get around this in the meantime. Hopefully that should reduce
the amount of data backed up by 2GB when we get to the bottom of that
issue (autovacuum)


You said in your other thread that your on Solaris 10, right? We are as well and just discovered that having stats_block_level set to on increases write volume a lot and noticed a significant drop when we turned it off as well a significant drop in wal file traffic. The same goes for stats_row_level (wrt write volume at least), but you need that if you want query information to come through pg_stat_activity (we left that on). We just migrated off of a server wherein forcedirectio actually helped us a lot, but now we're wondering if that was due to us having forcedirectio on. We only at the beginning of a lot of systems migrations and restructuring so now that we have some new avenues and room to experiment, I'll try to post our results in a couple weeks.

Erik Jones

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