A few months ago a couple guys got "bragging rights" for having the most separate databases. A couple guys claimed
severalhundred databases and one said he had several thousand databases. The concensus was that Postgres has no
problemhandling many separate databases.
I took that to heart and redesigned our system; we now have about 150 "primary data sources" that are used to build
coupleof "warehouses" that our customers actually search. Each database has about 20 tables. The total size (all
databasesand all tables together) is not huge, about 40 million rows. Eventually the warehouse (customer accessible)
databaseswill be moved to separate servers, configured and indexed specifically for the task.
The only problem I've encountered is messages in the log:
NOTICE: number of page slots needed (131904) exceeds max_fsm_pages (100000)
HINT: Consider increasing the configuration parameter "max_fsm_pages" to a value over 131904.
So I dutifully followed this advice:
max_fsm_pages = 320000
max_fsm_relations = 20000
This is based on our current 150 databases times 20 tables, or 3000 tables total. But I wasn't sure if sequences count
as"relations", which would double the number. So I set it at 20K relations to allow for growth.
Is there anything else I need to worry about? What happens if I go to, say, 500 databases (aside from increasing the
FSMnumbers even more)? 1000 databases?
The servers are 4 GB, dual Xeon, Postgres 8.1.4 on Linux FC4.
Thanks,
Craig