On Saturday, April 13, 2013, Rodrigo Barboza wrote:
I meant congestion, not contention.
Probably not. The practical difference between 0.5 and 0.7 is so small, that even if it did make a difference at one place and time, it would stop making a difference again in the future for no apparent reason.
Maybe. If you are dirtying the same set of pages over and over again, and that set of pages fits in shared_buffers, then lengthening the time between checkpoints could have a good effect. Otherwise, it probably would not.
Your best bet may be just to try it and see. But first, have you tried to tune shared_buffers?
What are you doing? Bulk loading? Frantically updating a small number of rows?
Do you have pg_xlog on a separate IO controller from the rest of the data? Do you have battery-backed/nonvolatile write cache?
Cheers,
Jeff