On Dec 5, 2007, at 7:50 AM, Robert Treat wrote:
On Wednesday 05 December 2007 07:22, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
Robert Treat wrote:
On Monday 03 December 2007 20:22, Erik Jones wrote:
Interesting. If this is anything you'd like to look into I can
provide whatever diagnostic output you need (iostat, vmstat, dtrace
script outputs, etc...) but I do have to reiterate that we are an
extreme corner case due to out schema size. For now, is
renaming the
#define'd paths for the stats file and temp file sufficient for
moving them? Basically, we'd like to move them onto a RAM disk to
give our disks a break.
Yeah, we've noticed the same problem (pgstat is the most active
file on
the system... uncovered in much the same way... go solaris).
Actually I
was wondering if it could be done with symlinks, a la moving xlogs.
Not really, because a new file is created and renamed in place
each time
it's going to be rewritten. So the symlink would be lost in the
first
file rewrite.
Ah yeah, thats what I concluded back then.
The first idea that comes to mind is to make the path configurable
via
GUC, so the user could set it to be written to an in-memory
filesystem
(/tmp in Solaris?).
Yep, thought of that to, though it was after feature freeze so I
didn't
propose it. Course if someone wants to sneak that in it would be
cool :-)
But then I thought, why do we need it to be a file
at all? Why not use a mmap'ed memory area or something like that,
and
only write it to a file on postmaster shutdown? (Losing the file on
unclean shutdown is not a problem, because the file is removed
anyway.)
I suppose you need some facility to spill to disk, so maybe being
in a file is
better? Seems it might not be in most cases... I wonder how big a
memory
space we (or Erik) need.
What I've done and tested on our test db server is to change lines 65
& 66 in pg_stat.c from
#define PGSTAT_STAT_FILENAME "global/pgstat.stat"
#define PGSTAT_STAT_TMPFILE "global/pgstat.tmp"
to
#define PGSTAT_STAT_FILENAME "global/pg_stats/pgstat.stat"
#define PGSTAT_STAT_TMPFILE "global/pg_stats/pgstat.tmp"
recompile and then create that pg_stats directory as a symlink to a
directory with a swapfs mounted in it. Everything seems to be
kosher. Of course, this adds a bit to our shutdown procedure in the
case where we're going to bounce the actual server in that we need to
make sure to copy the stats file(s) out of the swapfs directory in
order to preserve stats in that case (and back in afterwards, of
course).
Erik Jones
Software Developer | Emma®
erik@xxxxxxxxxx
800.595.4401 or 615.292.5888
615.292.0777 (fax)
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