Re: poor cpu utilization on dual cpu box

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com>
Cc: Simon Sadedin <pg_sicko(at)yahoo(dot)com>, pgsql-performance(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: poor cpu utilization on dual cpu box
Date: 2003-10-22 17:02:56
Message-ID: 17145.1066842176@sss.pgh.pa.us
Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox | Resend email
Thread:
Lists: pgsql-performance

Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> writes:
>> We are running with shared buffers large enough to hold the
>> entire database

> Which is bad. This is not what shared buffers are for. See:
> http://www.varlena.com/varlena/GeneralBits/Tidbits/perf.html

In fact, that may be the cause of the performance issue. The high
context-swap rate suggests heavy contention for shared-memory data
structures. The first explanation that occurs to me is that too much
time is being spent managing the buffer hashtable, causing that to
become a serialization bottleneck. Try setting shared_buffers to 10000
or so and see if it gets better.

regards, tom lane

In response to

Browse pgsql-performance by date

  From Date Subject
Next Message Simon Sadedin 2003-10-22 17:58:08 Re: poor cpu utilization on dual cpu box
Previous Message Josh Berkus 2003-10-22 16:58:28 Re: Low Insert/Update Performance