Do you know which of the settings is causing lower TPS ?
I suggest to check shared_buffers.
If you haven't done it, disabling THP and KSM can resolve performance issues,
esp. with large RAM like shared_buffers, at least with older kernels.
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20170718180152.GE17566%40telsasoft.com
I've tried reducing the number of variables to a bare minimum and have the following three cases now with RAID disabled:
a) only default settings [1]
b) default settings with shared_buffers=2G [2]
c) default settings with shared_buffers=2G & huge_pages=on [3]
The numbers are still not making any sense whatsoever.
+--------+--------------+----------------+---------------+
| client | Defaults [1] | buffers=2G [2] | buffers=2G |
| | | | huge_pages=on |
+--------+--------------+----------------+---------------+
| 1 | 348-475 (??) | 529-583 (??) | 155-290 |
+--------+--------------+----------------+---------------+
| 4 | 436-452 | 451-452 | 388-403 |
+--------+--------------+----------------+---------------+
| 8 | 862-869 | 859-861 | 778-781 |
+--------+--------------+----------------+---------------+
| 12 | 1210-1219 | 1220-1225 | 1110-1111 |
+--------+--------------+----------------+---------------+[1] Default settings
checkpoint_completion_target=0.5
default_statistics_target=100
effective_io_concurrency=1
max_parallel_workers=8
max_parallel_workers_per_gather=2
max_wal_size=1024 MB
max_worker_processes=20
min_wal_size=80 MB
random_page_cost=4
shared_buffers=1024 8kB
wal_buffers=32 8kB
work_mem=4096 kB
[2] Increased shared_buffers
checkpoint_completion_target=0.5
default_statistics_target=100
effective_io_concurrency=1
max_parallel_workers=8
max_parallel_workers_per_gather=2
max_wal_size=1024 MB
max_worker_processes=20
min_wal_size=80 MB
random_page_cost=4
shared_buffers=262144 8kB
wal_buffers=2048 8kB
work_mem=4096 kB
[3] Same settings as [2] with huge_pages=on and the following changes:
$ cat /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/enabled
always madvise [never]
$ cat /proc/meminfo |grep -i huge
AnonHugePages: 0 kB
ShmemHugePages: 0 kB
HugePages_Total: 5000
HugePages_Free: 3940
HugePages_Rsvd: 1
HugePages_Surp: 0
Hugepagesize: 2048 kB
-- Saurabh.
