Some scope of setting: I use postgres to manage metadata about field tests and simulations part of that involves HDF5 files. These hdf5 files are generated both with field testing and simulations so there's going to be a modest amount of them - in the 10k region eventually - an older database I've not yet migrated is 3K after a year. The DB is stored on a 14 drive zfs raidz2 split over 2 groups of 7 disks of 3TB each along with lots of field data (mainly images) out of the database and the rest of the inputs in the database due to complexity of management (versions, variants, garbage collection).
After encountering some 1GB limits while trying to post 300MB binary compressed hdf5 files into postgres 9.2 (under transactions) on a 16GB 64 bit linux machine and coming upon the following thread:
I spent some time trying to get things to work as is, raising what limits I could to no avail. So I decided to upgrade to 9.3 and use large binary objects rather than making another file store due to a large convenience of keeping everything in database. I noticed that my 35GB of files has become 46GB of files, and there are 18522822 enteries in pg_largeobject where as I only have 257 files ranging from 30MB to 400MB. To reiterate the data is compressed via several HDF filers, so postgres isn't going to do any better. It looks like unless there's 30% overhead for using pg_largeobject which is pretty expensive!
How can I disable TOAST compression or whatever is going on in pg_largeobject?
How in the world is 2KB block size for _large_ binary object a reasonable size? As far as I can tell, it is introducing a very large overhead.
Should I be changing LOBLKSIZE if this is the main factor of the 30% overhead? Is this straight forward? Long term, is that going to bite me back in the behind? I could maintain a package on opensuse's OBS, incorporating a patch and rebuilding against upstream, but I don't really have alot of ongoing time to deal with fallout if any.