Chris wrote (in part): > I didn't have logging set up before but it's up and running now and I > was getting > > LOG: checkpoints are occurring too frequently (26 seconds apart) > HINT: Consider increasing the configuration parameter > "checkpoint_segments". > > So I increased that from 10 to 30 and it finished: > > UPDATE 3500101 > Time: 146513.349 ms > I have not used postgreSQL since I tried it once in about 1998 (when I found it unsatisfactory, but much has changed since then), but I am going to try it again. What would be a good checkpointing interval? I would guess 26 seconds is too often. What considerations go into picking a checkpointing interval? I note, from the book "PostgreSQL" second edition by Douglas and Doublas, the following parameters are available: WAL_BUFFERS The default is 8. CHECKPOINT_SEGMENTS The default is 3. This would have been too low for the O.P. Would it make sense to start with a higher value or is this a good value and just not appropriate for the O.P.? Should CHECKPOINT_SEGMENTS be raised until the checkpointing is about half CHECKPOINT_TIMEOUT, e.g., 150 seconds while the dbms is running typical work? CHECKPOINT_TIMEOUT The default is 300 seconds. CHECKPOINT_WARNING The default is 30 seconds. My machine has 8 GBytes RAM and it worked perfectly well (very very little paging) when it had 4 GBytes RAM. I doubled it because it was cheap at the time and I was afraid it would become unavailable later. It is usually between 2/3 and 3/4 used by the cache. When I run IBM DB2 on it, the choke point is the IO time spent writing the logfiles. -- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. /V\ PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. /( )\ Shrewsbury, New Jersey http://counter.li.org ^^-^^ 07:20:01 up 7 days, 14:55, 3 users, load average: 4.26, 4.15, 4.07