Re: Auto-tuning work_mem and maintenance_work_mem

* Bruce Momjian (bruce(at)momjian(dot)us) wrote:
> Well, I like the idea of initdb calling the tool, though the tool then
> would need to be in C probably as we can't require python for initdb.
> The tool would not address Robert's issue of someone increasing
> shared_buffers on their own.

I'm really not impressed with this argument. Either the user is going
to go and modify the config file, in which case I would hope that they'd
at least glance around at what they should change, or they're going to
move off PG because it's not performing well enough for them- which is
really what I'm trying to avoid happening during the first 15m.

> In fact, the other constants would still
> be hard-coded in from initdb, which isn't good.

Actually, it *is* good, as Magnus pointed out. Changing a completely
unrelated parameter shouldn't make all of your plans suddenly change.
This is mollified, but only a bit, if you have a GUC that's explicitly
"this changes other GUCs", but I'd much rather have a tool that can do a
better job to begin with and which helps the user understand what
parameters are available to change and why there's more than one.

> I think the big win for a tool would be to query the user about how they
> are going to be using Postgres, and that can then spit out values the
> user can add to postgresql.conf, or to a config file that is included at
> the end of postgresql.conf.

Agreed.

Thanks,

Stephen