Re: Pgstat.tmp file activity

There's also a non-percent-based control as well. My understanding is
that segmap_percent doesn't work on some versions or architectures,
notably OpenSolaris.

On Tue, Dec 27, 2005 at 01:15:39PM -0800, Tom Arthurs wrote:
> From http://docs.sun.com/source/817-1836-10/perfplat.html
>
> High File System Page-in Rate
>
> If you are seeing high file system page-in rates on Solaris 8 or 9, you
> may benefit from increasing the value of segmap_percent. This parameter
> is set by adding the following line to the /etc/system file:
>
> set segmap_percent=25
>
> segmap_percent adjusts the percentage of memory that the kernel will map
> into its address space for the file system cache. The default value is
> 12; that is, the kernel will reserve enough space to map at most 12% of
> memory for the file system cache. On a heavily loaded machine with 4 GB
> of physical memory, improvements have been seen with values as high as
> 60. You should experiment with this value, starting with values around
> 25. On systems with large amounts of physical memory, you should raise
> this value in small increments, as it can significantly increase kernel
> memory requirements.
> ====================================
>
> I think this can also be set with the kernel debugger.
>
> I keep it at 50% on my E3500 and E4500 systems (8 and 12 GB memory).
>
> Jim C. Nasby wrote:
>
> >On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 04:50:32PM +1100, Dan Austin wrote:
> >
> >
> >>>[...]
> >>>Right, the file is fully written under a temp name, and then
> >>>rename()'d
> >>>
> >>>
> >>This makes sense and is almost certainly not the cause of the problem.
> >>Although there is a lot more data being written to that file than I
> >>would have thought.
> >>
> >>One of Sun's kernel engineers has come up with a solution that seems to
> >>have fixed the problem. Instead of increasing work_mem (which we still
> >>might do) we've mounted a swapfs partition over the pg temp directory:
> >>
> >> # mount | grep pgsql_tmp
> >> /export/data/pgsql/data/base/64920741/pgsql_tmp on swap [...]
> >>
> >>This has actually reduced the disk activity considerably. So far, the
> >>blocking problem seems to have gone.
> >>
> >>Now to find some Postgres DBAs in Sydney to do some review / tuning of
> >>our memory settings. :-)
> >>
> >>
> >
> >Note also that Solaris by default limits the amount of memory used for
> >disk caching, which is Not Good for PostgreSQL. IIRC this can be changed
> >with a sysctl, but I don't recall the details off-hand.
> >
> >
>
>
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--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
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