Larry,
Considering these recommendations, let's try setting shared_buffers to 2GB and work_mem to 16MB. The thing is that work_mem is per connection, and if we get too aggressive and we get a lot of simultaneous users, we can potentially eat up a lot of memory.
So 2GB + (100 * 16MB) = 3.6GB total RAM eaten up under peak load for these two values alone.
If we wanted to get more aggressive, we can raise work_mem.
Carlo
-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Marlowe [mailto:scott.marlowe@gmail.com]
Sent: November 1, 2007 5:39 PM
To: Carlo Stonebanks
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] How to avoid hashjoin and mergejoin
On 11/1/07, Carlo Stonebanks <stonec.register@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> I am comparing the same query on two different PG 8.2 servers, one Linux
> (8GB RAM) and one Windows (32GB RAM). Both have similar drives and CPU's.
>
> The Windows posgrestsql.config is pretty well tuned but it looks like
> someone had wiped out the Linux config so the default one was re-installed.
> All performance-related memory allocation values seem to be set to the
> defaults, but mods have been made: max_connections = 100 and shared_buffers
> = 32MB.
>
> The performance for this query is terrible on the Linux server, and good on
> the Windows server - presumably because the original Linux PG config has
> been lost. This query requires: that "set enable_seqscan to 'off';"
Have you run analyze on the server yet?
A few general points on performance tuning. With 8.2 you should set
shared_buffers to a pretty big chunk of memory on linux, up to 25% or
so. That means 32 Meg shared buffers is REAL low for a linux server.
Try running anywhere from 512Meg up to 1Gig for starters and see if
that helps too. Also turn up work_mem to something like 16 to 32 meg
then restart the server after making these changes.
Then give us the explain analyze output with all the enable_xxx set to ON.
summary: analyze, increase shared_buffers and work_mem, give us explain analyze.