I am interested in optimising write performance as well, the machine I am testing on is maxing out around 450 UPDATEs a second which is quite quick I suppose. I haven't tried turning fsync off yet. The table has...a lot of indices as well. They are mostly pretty simple partial indexes though.

I would usually just shuv stuff into memcached, but I need to store and sort (in realtime) 10's of thousands of rows. (I am experimenting with replacing some in house toplist generating stuff with a PG database.) The partial indexes are basically the only thing which makes the table usable btw.

The read performance is pretty damn good, but for some reason I chose to wrote the benchmark script in PHP, which can totally destroy the accuracy of your results if you decide to call pg_fetch_*(), even pg_affected_rows() can skew things significantly.

So any ideas how to improve the number of writes I can do a second? The existing system sorts everything by the desired column when a request is made, and the data it sorts is updated in realtime (whilst it isn't being sorted.) And it can sustain the read/write load (to memory) just fine. If I PG had heap tables this would probably not be a problem at all, but it does, so it is. Running it in a ramdisk would be acceptable, it's just annoying to create the db everytime the machine goes down. And having to run the entire PG instance off of the ramdisk isn't great either.

On 19 May 2005, at 23:21, Steve Bergman wrote:

Hi,

I am using postgresql in small (almost trivial) application in which I pull some data out of a Cobol C/ISAM file and write it into a pgsl table. My users can then use the data however they want by interfacing to the data from OpenOffice.org.

The amount of data written is about 60MB and takes a few minutes on a 1200Mhz Athlon with a single 60MB IDE drive running Fedora Core 3 with pgsql 7.4.7. I'd like to speed up the DB writes a bit if possible. Data integrity is not at all critical as the database gets dropped, created, and populated immediately before each use. Filesystem is ext3, data=ordered and I need to keep it that way as there is other data in the filesystem that I do care about. I have not done any tuning in the config file yet, and was wondering what things would likely speed up writes in this situation.

I'm doing the writes individually. Is there a better way? Combining them all into a transaction or something?

Thanks,
Steve Bergman

---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend




---------------------------(end of broadcast)---------------------------
TIP 7: don't forget to increase your free space map settings

Reply via email to