Re: postgresql.conf.*

On Wed, 2006-01-04 at 01:09, Paul Ramsey wrote:
> I just told yet another person to watch out that PgSQL ships with a
> conservative .conf file and would require tuning for best performance...
>
> Is there any reason we cannot ship with 3 .conf files?  For each one,
> note the minimum system configuration required to support it.
>
> postgresql.conf.standard  (current)
> postgresql.conf.medium  (1Gb of RAM, IDE RAID 1 (7200RPM))
> postgresql.conf.performance (4Gb of RAM, SCSI RAID 10 (10000RPM))
>

The problem here is that these numbers are all completely arbitrary, so
that your attempt at a "performance" conf could actually cause bad
performance for some people.

> I guess this gets back to auto-tuning scripts, and the difficulty of
> that, but it seems silly that every single person who installs
> postgresql has to independently learn that no, their shared_buffers
> need to be turned up.  Assuming they don't give up early and assume
> that PgSQL performance sucks (as popular myth would have them believe
> to start with).
>

Just FYI Andrew Dunstan did a little bit of work in this area, see
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-committers/2005-12/msg00486.php for
more details.


Robert Treat
--
Build A Brighter Lamp :: Linux Apache {middleware} PostgreSQL