Moving pgstat.stat and pgstat.tmp

Hi, I'm currently doctoring a situation wherein we've got table
inheritance scheme that over the years that has ballooned like only
in your nightmares (think well over 100K tables + indexes on those).
The obvious solution is to re-design the schema with a better
partitioning scheme in mind (see another msg from me later today on
that) but that's a big project that's just getting underway and an
immediate concern is the I/O on out data partition due in large part
to the stats file(s) getting hammered. We can verify this by looking
at our write volume 45+ Mbits/s and watching it drop to well below 10
on average when we disable stat_row_level as well as watching the
insane amounts of writes to pgstat.tmp when running the rwsnoop
dtrace script.

So, for the interim we're looking to move where the stats files are
written to. I've made the changes to the file paths for pgstat.stat
and pgstat.tmp in src/backend/postmaster/pgstat.c, recompiled and
verified that everything seems to be working ok on our test machine.
However, seeing as how I'm not all that familiar with the code base,
I'm asking here: is that all I need to do? Is there anything I've
missed?

Erik Jones

Software Developer | Emma®
erik(at)myemma(dot)com
800.595.4401 or 615.292.5888
615.292.0777 (fax)

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