On Wed, 2010-02-17 at 08:30 -0500, Jeff wrote: > Since getting on 8.4 I've been monitoring things fairly closely. > I whipped up a quick script to monitor pg_stat_bgwriter and save > deltas every minute so I can ensure my bgwriter is beating out the > backends for writes (as it is supposed to do). > > Now, the odd thing I'm running into is this: > > bgwriter_delay is 100ms (ie 10 times a second, give or take) > bgwriter_lru_maxpages is 500 (~5000 pages / second) > bgwriter_lru_multiplier is 4 > > Now, assuming I understand these values right the following is what > should typically happen: > > while(true) > { > if buffers_written > bgwriter_lru_maxpages > or buffers_written > anticipated_pages_needed * > bgwriter_lru_multiplier > { > sleep(bgwriter_delay ms) > continue; > } > ... > } Correct. > so I should not be able to have more than ~5000 bgwriter_clean pages > per minute. (this assumes writing takes 0ms, which of course is > inaccurate) That works out to 5000/second - 300,000/minute. > However, I see this in my stats (they are deltas), and I'm reasonably > sure it is not a bug in the code: > > (timestamp, buffers clean, buffers_checkpoint, buffers backend) > 2010-02-17 08:23:51.184018 | 1 | 1686 > | 5 > 2010-02-17 08:22:51.170863 | 15289 | 12676 > | 207 > 2010-02-17 08:21:51.155793 | 38467 | 8993 > | 4277 > 2010-02-17 08:20:51.139199 | 35582 | 0 > | 9437 > 2010-02-17 08:19:51.125025 | 8 | 0 > | 3 > 2010-02-17 08:18:51.111184 | 1140 | 1464 > | 6 > 2010-02-17 08:17:51.098422 | 0 | 1682 > | 228 > 2010-02-17 08:16:51.082804 | 50 | 0 > | 6 > 2010-02-17 08:15:51.067886 | 789 | 0 > | 1 > > perhaps some stats buffering occurring or something or some general > misunderstanding of some of these tunables? > > -- > Jeff Trout <jeff@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> > http://www.stuarthamm.net/ > http://www.dellsmartexitin.com/ > > > > -- Brad Nicholson 416-673-4106 Database Administrator, Afilias Canada Corp. -- Sent via pgsql-performance mailing list (pgsql-performance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-performance