Re: how do you manage postgres 9's postgres process's memory

Keith,

there are 2 excellent books. I purchased them a few weeks ago as I was
about to migrate all of my infrastructure to new hardware, and they have
been invaluable. Simon, Hannu, and Greg did an awesome job.

I ordered some massive servers, and in the course of benchmarking them
following their instructions it exposed apparent hardware issues - so
the 2 massive servers as well as one of the smaller ones got shipped
back to the supplier for them to check it out. Had I assumed the
servers were performing as the specs on paper indicated, I would have
been in serious trouble a few months down the line as we would have
reached limitations we were not aware of. Needless to say, I am still
anxious to get the working hardware, since it has put a huge monkey
wrench in our plans, but the info in the books (especially the
performance tuning one) saved my behind in ways I could not have
imagined. Not only that, going through that exercise of benchmarking
allowed me to extend some of the lessons learned to our current
production servers, so we are running much smoother now until we finally
migrate over.

Every person lurking in these lists would do themselves a huge service
getting these books.

http://www.2ndquadrant.com/books/

From: pgsql-admin-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org
[mailto:pgsql-admin-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Keith Gabryelski
Sent: Sunday, February 13, 2011 10:15 AM
To: Kevin Grittner
Cc: pgsql-admin(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] how do you manage postgres 9's postgres process's
memory

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Kevin Grittner
<Kevin(dot)Grittner(at)wicourts(dot)gov> wrote:

Keith Gabryelski <keith(at)fluentmobile(dot)com> wrote:

> here is an example of one process's growth over time --
>
> USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS

> postgres 20533 0.0 0.3 647388 52216

> [...]

> postgres 20533 0.0 0.9 663532 144328

Let's get the non-problem out of the way first. RSS includes shared
memory. Each process will basically be showing how much of the same
256MB shared memory segment it has touched, which will tend to
increase over time without having *anything* to do overall memory
usage. Ignore this. It is not a problem.

Yes, RSS includes shared memory -- the numbers I show you might

not be exactly related to total memory used but we can see from

historical graphs of used memory and from the machine crash

when used memory reached 16GB that this is certainly a problem.

please correct me further if I'm missing something -- but I can see

the postgres processes growing and the used memory growing

until I reset the connection by hand.

Is there anyway I can control the postgres's process's use of memory.

> the server is a 16GB ram, 4-processor x64 bit centos machine

> there can be up to (about) 750 connections to the machine

> work_mem = 256MB

Now this, on the other hand, is a potential problem. Each
connection which is running a query might reserve one or more
work_mem allocations. 256MB * 750 = 187.5GB. You have 16GB.
Now you describe your workload as heavy inserts, so perhaps this
isn't (currently) happening to you, but it's certainly something
you
want to watch.

there are a small number of clients that connect and do interesting

queries -- they do not amount to a potential problem. I'm not

worried about work_mem for the insert clients (which seem to be

the problem) because work_mem is not considered during these

simple inserts.

You didn't describe your storage environment, but let's assume
that
your effective_io_concurrency is on target. The benchmarking
I've
done of throughput and latency (response time) have shown best
performance at about ((2 * cores) + effective spindle count).
You
have four cores and (apparently) four "effective spindles"
(which is
a complex topic in itself). So, if your environment performs
like
mine, you will see your best performance if you funnel those 750
client-side connections down to about 12 database connections,
with
requests queued by the pooler when all 12 connections are busy.
With tens of thousands of concurrent clients hitting our web
site,
we were able to improve throughput and response time by cutting
our
connection pool from 60 connections to 30. (Of course, this is
on a
much larger system than you describe.)

interesting. can you point me to something that will help me understand

this performance and how I can apply it to my situation?

General comments on your config:

> max_connections = 1000

Far too high; you need to use your connection pooler better, or
use
a better connection pooler.

> shared_buffers = 512MB

Not insane, but possibly a little on the low side.

probably -- but it's difficult to understand what this number actually
does

for my system and its influence on postgres.

> maintenance_work_mem = 1024MB

OK

> max_stack_depth = 9MB

I've never adjusted this. I'm a bit curious why you did.

followed the instructions: the value of ulimit -s minus 1MB. it probably
doesn't matter.

> synchronous_commit = off

So you're OK with not necessarily having all transactions which
were
successfully committed represented in the database if there is a
crash? (That's not rhetorical -- for some applications that's
OK;
others, not so much.)

yes. i'm ok with this.

> commit_delay = 10
> commit_siblings = 2

Have you confirmed, through testing with your real workload,
that
these settings are helping? (I can see where they might, but
sometimes people adjust these without testing and actually make
things worse.)

yes. i've tested this.

> effective_cache_size = 1024MB

On a 16GB machine, that's probably too low to get the best plans
on
some complex queries. I'd probably be using something in the
neighborhood of 14GB. For the insert load it won't make any
difference; but when it comes to querying all that data, it
might.

i'll consider this. thank you.

One setting you didn't override which almost certainly would
help
your insert performance is wal_buffers. Try setting that to
16MB.

good point, thank you.

-Kevin

if I understand your position, though -- it is: reduce the number of
concurrent

connections to increase the overal throughput of inserts on the table
(because

they'll be less collisions on table locks??). this reduction in
connections

will reduce the maximum total memory used by them (but, still that is

just avoiding the inevitable, right -- if postgres processes can grow

larger than total memory, i'll still have a problem with 30 postgres
processes

as I do with 750 postgres processes).

thank you for your response, any pointers for me to educate myself on
these

things is greatly appreciated (a book?, google fu, web links?)

Pax, Keith