Re: [PERFORM] Beginner optimization questions, esp. regarding Tsearch2

2006-08-16 Thread Carl Youngblood

The relevant portion of my sysctl.conf file looks like this:

kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
fs.file-max = 65536

I understood it was a good idea to set shmmax to half of available
memory (2GB in this case).  I assume that I need to set shared_buffers
slightly lower than 2GB for postgresql to start successfully.

Carl

On 8/15/06, Jim C. Nasby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 12:47:54PM -0600, Carl Youngblood wrote:
 I tried setting it to 2GB and postgres wouldn't start.  Didn't
 investigate in much greater detail as to why it wouldn't start, but
 after switching it back to 1GB it started fine.

Most likely because you didn't set the kernel's shared memory settings
high enough.


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Re: [PERFORM] Beginner optimization questions, esp. regarding Tsearch2

2006-08-16 Thread Jim C. Nasby
On Wed, Aug 16, 2006 at 09:34:24AM -0600, Carl Youngblood wrote:
 The relevant portion of my sysctl.conf file looks like this:
 
 kernel.shmall = 2097152
 kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
 kernel.shmmni = 4096
 kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
 fs.file-max = 65536
 
 I understood it was a good idea to set shmmax to half of available
 memory (2GB in this case).  I assume that I need to set shared_buffers

I don't see any reason to do that, so long as you have control over
what's being run on the system. Just set it to 30 or so.

 slightly lower than 2GB for postgresql to start successfully.
 
 Carl
 
 On 8/15/06, Jim C. Nasby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 12:47:54PM -0600, Carl Youngblood wrote:
  I tried setting it to 2GB and postgres wouldn't start.  Didn't
  investigate in much greater detail as to why it wouldn't start, but
  after switching it back to 1GB it started fine.
 
 Most likely because you didn't set the kernel's shared memory settings
 high enough.
 
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-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Pervasive Software  http://pervasive.comwork: 512-231-6117
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Re: [PERFORM] Beginner optimization questions, esp. regarding Tsearch2

2006-08-15 Thread Carl Youngblood

I tried setting it to 2GB and postgres wouldn't start.  Didn't
investigate in much greater detail as to why it wouldn't start, but
after switching it back to 1GB it started fine.

On 8/15/06, Jim C. Nasby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

See the recent thread about how old rules of thumb for shared_buffers
are now completely bunk. With 4G of memory, setting shared_buffers to 2G
could easily be reasonable. The OP really needs to test several
different values with their actual workload and see what works best.


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Re: [PERFORM] Beginner optimization questions, esp. regarding Tsearch2

2006-08-15 Thread Carl Youngblood

By the way, can you please post a link to that thread?

On 8/15/06, Jim C. Nasby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

See the recent thread about how old rules of thumb for shared_buffers
are now completely bunk. With 4G of memory, setting shared_buffers to 2G
could easily be reasonable. The OP really needs to test several
different values with their actual workload and see what works best.


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Re: [PERFORM] Beginner optimization questions, esp. regarding Tsearch2

2006-08-15 Thread Jim C. Nasby
On Tue, Aug 15, 2006 at 12:47:54PM -0600, Carl Youngblood wrote:
 I tried setting it to 2GB and postgres wouldn't start.  Didn't
 investigate in much greater detail as to why it wouldn't start, but
 after switching it back to 1GB it started fine.
 
Most likely because you didn't set the kernel's shared memory settings
high enough.

To answer you other question:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2006-08/msg00095.php

 On 8/15/06, Jim C. Nasby [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
 See the recent thread about how old rules of thumb for shared_buffers
 are now completely bunk. With 4G of memory, setting shared_buffers to 2G
 could easily be reasonable. The OP really needs to test several
 different values with their actual workload and see what works best.
 
 ---(end of broadcast)---
 TIP 1: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate
   subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your
   message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
 

-- 
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Pervasive Software  http://pervasive.comwork: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf   cell: 512-569-9461

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Re: [PERFORM] Beginner optimization questions, esp. regarding Tsearch2

2006-08-10 Thread Richard Huxton

Carl Youngblood wrote:

- I noticed that there are six different postmaster daemons running.
Only one of them is taking up a lot of RAM (1076m virtual and 584m
resident).  The second one is using 181m resident while the others are
less than 20m each.  Is it normal to have multiple postmaster
processes?


You should have one master backend process and one per connection. PG is 
a classic multi-process designed server.


 Even the biggest process doesn't seem to be using near as

much RAM as I have on this machine.  Is that bad?  What percentage of
my physical memory should I expect postgres to use for itself?  How
can I encourage it to cache more query results in memory?


OK - one of the key things with PostgreSQL is that it relies on the O.S. 
to cache its disk files. So, allocating too much memory to PG can be 
counterproductive.


From your figures, you're allocating about 64MB to work_mem, which is 
per sort. So, a complex query could use several times that amount. If 
you don't have many concurrent queries that might be what you want.


Also, you've allocated 1GB to your shared_buffers which is more than I'd 
use as a starting point.


You've only mentioned one main table with 100,000 rows, so presumably 
you're going to cache the entire DB in RAM. So, you'll want to increase 
effective_cache_size and reduce random_page_cost.


--
  Richard Huxton
  Archonet Ltd

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Re: [PERFORM] Beginner optimization questions, esp. regarding Tsearch2

2006-08-10 Thread Markus Schaber
Hi, Richard and Carl,

Richard Huxton wrote:
 Carl Youngblood wrote:
 - I noticed that there are six different postmaster daemons running.
 Only one of them is taking up a lot of RAM (1076m virtual and 584m
 resident).  The second one is using 181m resident while the others are
 less than 20m each.  Is it normal to have multiple postmaster
 processes?
 
 You should have one master backend process and one per connection. PG is
 a classic multi-process designed server.

There may be some additional background processes, such as the
background writer, stats collector or autovacuum, depending on your
version and configuration.

HTH,
Markus

-- 
Markus Schaber | Logical TrackingTracing International AG
Dipl. Inf. | Software Development GIS

Fight against software patents in EU! www.ffii.org www.nosoftwarepatents.org

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Re: [PERFORM] Beginner optimization questions, esp. regarding Tsearch2

2006-08-10 Thread Carl Youngblood

Thanks a lot for the advice Richard.  I will try those things out and
report back to the list.

Carl

On 8/10/06, Richard Huxton dev@archonet.com wrote:

 From your figures, you're allocating about 64MB to work_mem, which is
per sort. So, a complex query could use several times that amount. If
you don't have many concurrent queries that might be what you want.

Also, you've allocated 1GB to your shared_buffers which is more than I'd
use as a starting point.

You've only mentioned one main table with 100,000 rows, so presumably
you're going to cache the entire DB in RAM. So, you'll want to increase
effective_cache_size and reduce random_page_cost.


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[PERFORM] Beginner optimization questions, esp. regarding Tsearch2 configuration

2006-08-09 Thread Carl Youngblood

I'm trying to optimize a resume search engine that is using Tsearch2
indexes.  It's running on a dual-opteron 165 system with 4GB of ram
and a raid1 3Gb/sec SATA array.  Each text entry is about 2-3K of
text, and there are about 23,000 rows in the search table, with a goal
of reaching about 100,000 rows eventually.

I'm running Ubuntu 6.06 amd64 server edition.  The raid array is a
software-based linux array with LVM on top of it and the file system
for the database mount point is XFS.  The only optimization I've done
so far is to put the following in /etc/sysctl.conf:

kernel.shmall = 2097152
kernel.shmmax = 2147483648
kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.sem = 250 32000 100 128
fs.file-max = 65536

And in postgresql.conf I set the following parameters:

shared_buffers = 131072
work_mem = 65536
max_stack_depth = 4096
max_fsm_pages = 4
max_fsm_relations = 2000

These probably aren't ideal but I was hoping they would perform a
little better than the defaults.  I got the following results from a
pgbench script I picked up off the web:

CHECKPOINT
= sync ==
10 concurrent users...
transaction type: TPC-B (sort of)
scaling factor: 10
number of clients: 10
number of transactions per client: 100
number of transactions actually processed: 1000/1000
tps = 632.146016 (including connections establishing)
tps = 710.474526 (excluding connections establishing)

Once again I don't know if these results are good or not for my hardware.

I have a couple of questions:

- Does anyone have some good advice for optimizing postgres for
tsearch2 queries?
- I noticed that there are six different postmaster daemons running.
Only one of them is taking up a lot of RAM (1076m virtual and 584m
resident).  The second one is using 181m resident while the others are
less than 20m each.  Is it normal to have multiple postmaster
processes?  Even the biggest process doesn't seem to be using near as
much RAM as I have on this machine.  Is that bad?  What percentage of
my physical memory should I expect postgres to use for itself?  How
can I encourage it to cache more query results in memory?

Thanks in advance for your time.

Carl Youngblood

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