Re: Clearing global statistics

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 1:11 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>> Actually, that brings up a more general question: what's with the
>>> enthusiasm for clearing statistics *at all*?
>
>> ... Right now, you're still carrying around
>> the history of the bad period forever though, and every check of the
>> pg_stat_bgwriter requires manually subtracting the earlier values out.
>
> Seems like a more appropriate solution would be to make it easier to do
> that subtraction, ie, make it easier to capture the values at a given
> time point and then get deltas from there.  It's more general (you could
> have multiple saved sets of values), and doesn't require superuser
> permissions to do, and doesn't have the same potential for
> damn-I-wish-I-hadn't-done-that moments.

True, but it's also more complicated to use. Most systems I'm
familiar with[1] that have performance counters just provide an option
to clear them. Despite the disadvantages you cite, it seems to be
fairly useful in practice; anyway, I have found it so.

...Robert

[1] The other design I've seen is a system that automatically resets,
say, once a day. It retains the statistics for the 24-hour period
between the most recent two resets, and the statistics for the partial
period following the last reset. But that doesn't seem appropriate
for PostgreSQL....