Re: [PERFORM] psql large RSS (1.6GB)

2004-11-01 Thread Gavin Sherry
On Sat, 30 Oct 2004, Dustin Sallings wrote:

If the solution is to just write a little client that uses perl
  DBI to fetch rows one at a time and write them out, that's doable,
  but it would be nice if psql could be made to just work without
  the monster RSS.

   It wouldn't make a difference unless that driver implements the
 underlying protocol on its own.

Even though we can tell people to make use of cursors, it seems that
memory usage for large result sets should be addressed. A quick search of
the archives does not reveal any discussion about having libpq spill to
disk if a result set reaches some threshold. Has this been canvassed in
the past?

Thanks,

Gavin

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Re: [PERFORM] psql large RSS (1.6GB)

2004-11-01 Thread Bruce Momjian
Gavin Sherry wrote:
 On Sat, 30 Oct 2004, Dustin Sallings wrote:
 
 If the solution is to just write a little client that uses perl
   DBI to fetch rows one at a time and write them out, that's doable,
   but it would be nice if psql could be made to just work without
   the monster RSS.
 
  It wouldn't make a difference unless that driver implements the
  underlying protocol on its own.
 
 Even though we can tell people to make use of cursors, it seems that
 memory usage for large result sets should be addressed. A quick search of
 the archives does not reveal any discussion about having libpq spill to
 disk if a result set reaches some threshold. Has this been canvassed in
 the past?

No, I don't remember hearing this discussed and I don't think most
people would want libpq spilling to disk by default.

-- 
  Bruce Momjian|  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   |  (610) 359-1001
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Re: [PERFORM] psql large RSS (1.6GB)

2004-11-01 Thread Josh Berkus
Tom,

 Far more useful would be some sort of streaming API to let the
 application process the rows as they arrive, or at least fetch the rows
 in small batches (the V3 protocol supports the latter even without any
 explicit use of a cursor). I'm not sure if this can be bolted onto the
 existing libpq framework reasonably, but that's the direction I'd prefer
 to go in.

I think that TelegraphCQ incorporates this.   However, I'm not sure whether 
it's a portable component; it may be too tied in to their streaming query 
engine.   They have talked about porting their background query patch for 
PSQL, though ...

-- 
Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco

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Re: [PERFORM] psql large RSS (1.6GB)

2004-10-31 Thread Dustin Sallings
On Oct 27, 2004, at 0:57, TTK Ciar wrote:
  At a guess, it looks like the data set is being buffered in its
entirety by psql, before any data is written to the output file,
which is surprising.  I would have expected it to grab data as it
appeared on the socket from postmaster and write it to disk.  Is
there something we can do to stop psql from buffering results?
Does anyone know what's going on here?
	Yes, the result set is sent back to the client before it can be used.  
An easy workaround when dealing with this much data is to use a cursor. 
 Something like this:

db# start transaction;
START TRANSACTION
db# declare logcur cursor for select * from some_table;
DECLARE CURSOR
db# fetch 5 in logcur;
[...]
(5 rows)
	This will do approximately what you expected the select to do in the 
first, place, but the fetch will decide how many rows to buffer into 
the client at a time.

  If the solution is to just write a little client that uses perl
DBI to fetch rows one at a time and write them out, that's doable,
but it would be nice if psql could be made to just work without
the monster RSS.
	It wouldn't make a difference unless that driver implements the 
underlying protocol on its own.

--
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pub  1024/3CAE01D5 1994/11/03 Dustin Sallings [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Re: [PERFORM] psql large RSS (1.6GB)

2004-10-31 Thread Markus Bertheau
 , 27.10.2004,  09:57, TTK Ciar :

 brad=# explain analyse select 
 ServerDisks.servername,ServerDisks.diskserial,ServerDisks.diskmountpoint,DiskFiles.name,DiskFiles.md5
  from DiskFiles,ServerDisks where DiskFiles.diskserial=ServerDisks.diskserial;
   QUERY PLAN 
 
 --
  Hash Join  (cost=22.50..65.00 rows=1000 width=274) (actual time=118.584..124653.729 
 rows=10133349 loops=1)
Hash Cond: ((outer.diskserial)::text = (inner.diskserial)::text)
-  Seq Scan on diskfiles  (cost=0.00..20.00 rows=1000 width=198) (actual 
 time=7.201..31336.063 rows=10133349 loops=1)
-  Hash  (cost=20.00..20.00 rows=1000 width=158) (actual time=90.821..90.821 
 rows=0 loops=1)
  -  Seq Scan on serverdisks  (cost=0.00..20.00 rows=1000 width=158) (actual 
 time=9.985..87.364 rows=2280 loops=1)
  Total runtime: 130944.586 ms

You should run ANALYZE on your database once in a while.

-- 
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[PERFORM] psql large RSS (1.6GB)

2004-10-30 Thread TTK Ciar
Hello!

  My name is TTK, and I'm a software engineer at the Internet Archive's 
Data Repository department.  We have recently started using postgresql 
for a couple of projects (we have historically been a MySQL outfit), 
and today my co-worker noticed psql eating memory like mad when invoked 
with a simple select statement incorporating a join of two tables.

  The platform is a heavily modified RedHat 7.3 Linux.  We are using 
version 7.4.5 of postgresql.

  The invocation was via sh script:

#!/bin/bash

outfile=$1
if [ -z $outfile ]; then
outfile=/0/brad/all_arcs.txt
fi

/usr/lib/postgresql/bin/psql -c 'select 
ServerDisks.servername,ServerDisks.diskserial,ServerDisks.diskmountpoint,DiskFiles.name,DiskFiles.md5
 from DiskFiles,ServerDisks where DiskFiles.diskserial=ServerDisks.diskserial;' -F ' ' 
-A -t -o $outfile

.. and the tables in question are somewhat large (hundreds of GB's 
of data), though we didn't expect that to be an issue as far as the 
psql process was concerned.

  We monitored server load via 'top -i -d 0.5' and watched the output 
file for data.  Over the course of about 200 seconds, psql's RSS 
climbed to about 1.6 GB, and stayed there, while no data was written 
to the output file.  Eventually 10133194 lines were written to the 
output file, all at once, about 1.2GB's worth of data.

  I re-ran the select query using psql in interactive mode, and saw 
the same results.

  I re-ran it again, using explain analyse, and this time psql's 
RSS did *not* increase significantly.  The result is here, if it 
helps:

brad=# explain analyse select 
ServerDisks.servername,ServerDisks.diskserial,ServerDisks.diskmountpoint,DiskFiles.name,DiskFiles.md5
 from DiskFiles,ServerDisks where DiskFiles.diskserial=ServerDisks.diskserial;
  QUERY PLAN   
  
--
 Hash Join  (cost=22.50..65.00 rows=1000 width=274) (actual time=118.584..124653.729 
rows=10133349 loops=1)
   Hash Cond: ((outer.diskserial)::text = (inner.diskserial)::text)
   -  Seq Scan on diskfiles  (cost=0.00..20.00 rows=1000 width=198) (actual 
time=7.201..31336.063 rows=10133349 loops=1)
   -  Hash  (cost=20.00..20.00 rows=1000 width=158) (actual time=90.821..90.821 
rows=0 loops=1)
 -  Seq Scan on serverdisks  (cost=0.00..20.00 rows=1000 width=158) (actual 
time=9.985..87.364 rows=2280 loops=1)
 Total runtime: 130944.586 ms

  At a guess, it looks like the data set is being buffered in its 
entirety by psql, before any data is written to the output file, 
which is surprising.  I would have expected it to grab data as it 
appeared on the socket from postmaster and write it to disk.  Is 
there something we can do to stop psql from buffering results? 
Does anyone know what's going on here?

  If the solution is to just write a little client that uses perl 
DBI to fetch rows one at a time and write them out, that's doable, 
but it would be nice if psql could be made to just work without 
the monster RSS.

  I'd appreciate any feedback.  If you need any additional info, 
please let me know and I will provide it.

  -- TTK
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]
  [EMAIL PROTECTED]


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