Re: priority on a process

Shaunn Johnson writes:

> I have a process running and it seems that it is not
> using very much of the available resources on the server

I have the same non-problem. :)

Basically Postgres is pretty darn efficient. On my server, Postgres is
using around 16MB of memory (very small db so far), and my Java Servlet
engine is using around 225MB. Yeah.

You can change the priority of any process with the nice and renice
commands. Read the man pages; they're pretty straightforward.

However, if your database server is doing nothing but Postgres (which is
generally how you should have it set up for production use), changing
the priority won't help.

The big thing is filesystem buffering and cacheing. As long as you have
plenty of RAM, Pg can cache filesystem data in RAM which is far faster
than fetching it from disk. Ideally you will have enough RAM to hold
your entire data set. The next best thing is to have a fast storage
array with many spindles.

Basically, don't worry about performance until it's a problem, and then
worry about the specific bottleneck that exists in your situation.