Re: Enhancement Request

On Tue, Mar 04, 2014 at 02:49:32PM +0000, Campbell, Lance wrote:
> Web Services at the University of Illinois has been using PostgreSQL for 11 years for serving up web content. We generate around two million pages of database driven content a month. We love the work you are doing.
>
> I have an enhancement request. Sometimes when using a database there is a need to have particular tables always in memory. An example of this would be our web application session data. The session data is used by a cluster of tomcat nodes. It would be nice to have a way to say to PostgreSQL, put this particular table data in memory always. If you already have this feature please let me know. There would probably also need to be a way to see how much data is being taken up by these preferred tables. This would probably require other things to also be put into memory as well like indexes.
>
> To get around this issue we are planning on implementing a second PostgreSQL database on a dedicated server in order to make sure the session data is always in memory. But it would be nice to not actually have a second server for just session data if we really don't need it.
>
> Thanks for considering this idea.
>

Hi Lance,

You might also want to take a look at pgmemcache:

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgmemcache/

It is a PostgreSQL interface to memcached which seems like it would fit your
needs for session data very well. The other option that was already mentioned
is to make a tmpfs tablespace.

Regards,
Ken