Aurora doesn’t use a typical file system so the RAM usually reserved for the OS file system bufffer cache is instead used for shared_buffers.
We run multiple Aurora/ PG instances and they work quite well. There are limitations in superuser private, so be aware of that, but generally speaking Aurora/PG works well.
Bob Lunney
Sent from my PDP11
This question is probably more of a fit for the performance list, sorry for the cross post
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All;
My apologies if this is off topic.
Our company is moving to Aurora, In the past I would take care not to allow postgresql to over-commit memory beyond the actual memory on the server, which meant I would add the buffer pool + (work_mem * max_connections) + (maintenance_work_mem * autovacuum threads)
However as I look at the aroura defaults they are all off the charts, for example, based on the calculations in the config (amazon doesn't make it easy, some settings are in pages, some are in kb, some are who knows what) I see the following settings as default in our aroura config:
The instance size is db.r4.xlarge
this instance size is listed as having 30.5GB of ram
Here's the default settings:
shared_buffers: {DBInstanceClassMemory/10922}
which equates to 24GB
work_mem: 64000 (kb)
which equates to 65.5MB
maintenance_work_mem: GREATEST({DBInstanceClassMemory/63963136*1024},65536)
which equates to 4.2GB
max_connections: LEAST({DBInstanceClassMemory/9531392},5000)
which equates to 3,380
According to my math (If I got it right) in a worst case scenario,
if we maxed out max_connections, work_mem and maintenance_work_mem limits
the db would request 247GB of memory
Additionally amazon has set effective_cache_size =
{DBInstanceClassMemory/10922}
which equates to about 2.9MB (which given the other outlandish setting may be the only appropriate setting in the system)
What the hell is amazon doing here? Am I missing the boat on tuning postgresql memory? Is amazon simply counting on the bet that users will never fully utilize an instance?
Thanks in advance