Re: Scalability in postgres

On Fri, 5 Jun 2009, Greg Smith wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Jun 2009, Robert Haas wrote:
>
>> That's because this thread has altogether too much theory and
>> altogether too little gprof.
>
> But running benchmarks and profiling is actual work; that's so much less fun
> than just speculating about what's going on!
>
> This thread reminds me of Jignesh's "Proposal of tunable fix for scalability
> of 8.4" thread from March, except with only a fraction of the real-world
> detail. There are multiple high-profile locks causing scalability concerns
> at quadruple digit high user counts in the PostgreSQL code base, finding them
> is easy. Shoot, I know exactly where a couple are, and I didn't have to
> think about it at all--just talked with Jignesh a couple of times, led me
> right to them. Fixing them without causing regressions in low client count
> cases, now that's the hard part. No amount of theoretical discussion
> advances that any until you're at least staring at a very specific locking
> problem you've already characterized extensively via profiling. And even
> then, profiling trumps theory every time. This is why I stay out of these
> discussions and work on boring benchmark tools instead.

actually, as I see it we are a step before that.

it seems that people are arguing that there is no need to look for and fix
this sort of thing, on the basis that anyone who trips over these problems
is doing something wrong to start with and needs to change the behavior of
their app.

David Lang