How to think about

performance
Selena Deckelmann
PostgreSQL User Group Liaison
postgresql.org

End Point Corporation

Hubris
 Case Study:
How we are teaching
people to think about
performance
PostgreSQL Portland
Performance Practice
Project
Monthly meetings to talk about
performance
 Mark Wong

http://pugs.postgresql.org/blog/92
Meetings at Portland State University

Hardware donated by HP

Data center space from Command

Prompt, Inc.
 Our data:

http://moourl.com/fsperf
What do we teach?
Bottlenecks
Baselining
Constraints
Bottlenecks
 sar
mpstat
iostat
vmstat
readprofile
Baselining
• Application-specific.
• Filesystem performance.
• Start from defaults.
• Change one thing at a time.
• Use Science.
Constraints
• Hardware
• Operating system
• Time/Money
• Patience
We need your help.
• Go through our data.
• Pose new questions.
• Ask us about running tests.
How Postgres thinks
about performance
Synchronized Scan
“Do you need to start
at the beginning?”

• Have a sequential scan in progress?

• Piggy-back on that sequential scan.
• Version 8.3
HOT
 “Don’t do something
you don’t have to.”
• Heap Only Tuples (HOT)
• Have an UPDATE to a table that doesn’t
affect an index?
• Don’t update the index.
• Version 8.3
Visibility Map
 “Don’t do something
you don’t have to.”
• Free Space Map shows space in table files
that is available for reuse.
• Visibility Map is a bitmap that tells whether
or not a tuple is visible to all transaction
ids. If marked visible, don’t bother
VACUUMing.
• Reduces VACUUM cost (less I/O)
• Version 8.4 (beta out now!)
 Thanks!
Postgres BoF 7:30pm
Camino Real
@selenamarie (identi.ca/twitter)
selena@postgresql.org