Re: Throttling PostgreSQL's CPU usage

> Thanks for all the feedback. Unfortunately I didn't specify that this
> is running on a WinXP machine (the 3D renderer is an ActiveX plugin),
> and I don't even think "nice" is available. I've tried using the
> Windows Task Manager to set every postgres.exe process to a low
> priority, but that didn't make a difference.

Are you sure you're actually cpu limited? The windows schedules is actually pretty good at down shifting like that. It sounds like you might be i/o bound
instead. Especially if you're on ide disks in this machine.

> Several people have mentioned having multiple processors; my current
> machine is a uni-processor machine, but I believe we could spec the
> actual runtime machine to have multiple processors/cores. I'm only
> running one query at a time; would that query be guaranteed to
> confine itself to a single processor/core?

Yes. Background processes can run on the other, like the background writer. They normally don't use a lot of cpu. You can avoid that as well by setting the cpu
affinity on pg_ctl or postmaster.

> In terms of performance, I don't think simply more power will do the
> trick; I've got an AMD 3200+, and even doubling the power/halving the
> stutter time won't be good enough.

Again, make sure cpu really is the problem.

/Magnus