Feature Request --- was: PostgreSQL Performance Tuning

Steve Crawford wrote:
> Have you changed _anything_ from the defaults? The defaults are set so
> PG will run on as many installations as practical. They are not set for
> performance - that is specific to your equipment, your data, and how you
> need to handle the data.
Is this really the sensible thing to do?   I know we should not encourage
the world we're leaving in even more in the ways of "have the computer
do everything for us so that we don't need to have even a clue about what
we're doing" ...  But, wouldn't it make sense that the configure script
determines the amount of physical memory and perhaps even do a HD
speed estimate to set up defaults that are closer to a
performance-optimized
configuration?

Then, perhaps command switches so that you could specify the type of
access you estimate for your system.  Perhaps something like:

./configure --db-size=100GB --write-percentage=20  .... etc.

(switch write-percentage above indicates that we estimate that 20% of
the DB activity would be writing to the disk --- there may be other
switches to indicate the percentage of queries that are transactions,
the percentage of queries that are complex;  percentage that require
index usage, etc. etc. etc.)...  And then, based on that, a better set of
defaults could be set by the configuration script.

Does this make sense?  Or perhaps I'm watching too much science
fiction?

Carlos
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