Re: how do you manage postgres 9's postgres process's memory

Keith Gabryelski <keith@fluentmobile.com> wrote:

> here is an example of one process's growth over time --
>
> USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS
> postgres 20533  0.0  0.3 647388 52216
> [...]
> postgres 20533  0.0  0.9 663532 144328

Let's get the non-problem out of the way first.  RSS includes shared
memory.  Each process will basically be showing how much of the same
256MB shared memory segment it has touched, which will tend to
increase over time without having *anything* to do overall memory
usage.  Ignore this.  It is not a problem.

> the server is a 16GB ram, 4-processor x64 bit centos machine

> there can be up to (about) 750 connections to the machine

> work_mem = 256MB

Now this, on the other hand, is a potential problem.  Each
connection which is running a query might reserve one or more
work_mem allocations.  256MB * 750 = 187.5GB.  You have 16GB.
Now you describe your workload as heavy inserts, so perhaps this
isn't (currently) happening to you, but it's certainly something you
want to watch.

You didn't describe your storage environment, but let's assume that
your effective_io_concurrency is on target.  The benchmarking I've
done of throughput and latency (response time) have shown best
performance at about ((2 * cores) + effective spindle count).  You
have four cores and (apparently) four "effective spindles" (which is
a complex topic in itself).  So, if your environment performs like
mine, you will see your best performance if you funnel those 750
client-side connections down to about 12 database connections, with
requests queued by the pooler when all 12 connections are busy.
With tens of thousands of concurrent clients hitting our web site,
we were able to improve throughput and response time by cutting our
connection pool from 60 connections to 30.  (Of course, this is on a
much larger system than you describe.)

General comments on your config:

> max_connections = 1000

Far too high; you need to use your connection pooler better, or use
a better connection pooler.

> shared_buffers = 512MB

Not insane, but possibly a little on the low side.

> maintenance_work_mem = 1024MB

OK

> max_stack_depth = 9MB

I've never adjusted this.  I'm a bit curious why you did.

> synchronous_commit = off

So you're OK with not necessarily having all transactions which were
successfully committed represented in the database if there is a
crash?  (That's not rhetorical -- for some applications that's OK;
others, not so much.)

> commit_delay = 10
> commit_siblings = 2

Have you confirmed, through testing with your real workload, that
these settings are helping?  (I can see where they might, but
sometimes people adjust these without testing and actually make
things worse.)

> effective_cache_size = 1024MB

On a 16GB machine, that's probably too low to get the best plans on
some complex queries.  I'd probably be using something in the
neighborhood of 14GB.  For the insert load it won't make any
difference; but when it comes to querying all that data, it might.

One setting you didn't override which almost certainly would help
your insert performance is wal_buffers.  Try setting that to 16MB.

-Kevin