Re: PostgreSQL-9.0 Monitoring System to improve performance

Venkat Balaji wrote:

1. Big Full Table Scans
2. Table with high IOs (hot tables)
3. Highly used Indexes
4. Tables undergoing high DMLs with index scans 0 (with unused indexes)
5. Index usage for heap blk hits
6. Tracking Checkpoints

This is fairly easy to collect and analyze.  You might take a look at pgstatspack to see how one program collects snapshots of this sort of information:  http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgstatspack/

I am in the process  of installing pgstatspack ( i have used it before ). We are waiting for the downtime (to load this through shared preloaded libraries).

8. Buffer cache usage

High-level information about this can be collected by things like the pg_statio* views.  If you want to actually look inside the buffer cache and get detailed statistics on it, that's a harder problem.  I have some sample queries for that sort of thing in my book.

I do have pgstattuple contrib module installed and is collecting the data and loading it into the auditing tables.

9. Tables, Indexes and Database growth statistics

This is valuable information to monitor over time, but I'm not aware of any existing tools that track it well.  It won't be hard to collect it on your own though.

We are getting it done on daily basis and we also have metrics of data growth

7. Tracking CPU, IO and memory usage ( by PG processes ) -- desperately needed

I'm not aware of any open-source tool that tracks this information yet.  PostgreSQL has no idea what CPU, memory, and I/O is being done by the OS when you execute a query.  The operating system knows some of that, but has no idea what the database is doing.  You can see a real-time snapshot combining the two pieces of info using the pg_top program:  http://ptop.projects.postgresql.org/ but I suspect what you want is a historical record of it instead.

Writing something that tracks both at once and logs all the information for later analysis is one of the big missing pieces in PostgreSQL management.  I have some ideas for how to build such a thing.  But I expect it will take a few months of development time to get right, and I haven't come across someone yet who wants to fund that size of project for this purpose yet.

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Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    greg@2ndQuadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
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