On Fri, Jun 9, 2023 at 4:06 AM Gurjeet Singh <gurjeet@singh.im> wrote:
There is no mention of perf or similar utilities in pgbench-tools docs. I'm guessing Linux is the primary platform pgbench-tools gets used on most. If so, I think it'd be useful to mention these tools and snippets in there to make others lives easier.
That's a good idea. I've written out guides multiple times for customers who are crashing and need to learn about stack traces, to help them becomes self-sufficient with the troubleshooting parts it's impractical for me to do for them. If I can talk people through gdb, I can teach them perf. I have a lot of time to work on pgbench-tools set aside this summer, gonna finally deprecate the gnuplot backend and make every graph as nice as the ones I shared here.
I haven't been aggressive about pushing perf because a lot of customers at Crunchy--a disproportionately larger number than typical I suspect--have operations restrictions that just don't allow DBAs direct access to a server's command line. So perf commands are just out of reach before we even get to the permissions it requires. I may have to do something really wild to help them, like see if the right permissions setup would allow PL/python3 or similar to orchestrate a perf session in a SQL function.