Re: Google SoC--Idea Request

Jim C. Nasby wrote:

>On Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 11:05:18PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>
>
>>"Jonah H. Harris" <jonah(dot)harris(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>>
>>
>>>While the student could do some benchmarking on relatively new
>>>hardware and make suggestions, I agree with Tom. Having to keep
>>>support for older platforms doesn't leave much flexibility to change
>>>the defaults.
>>>
>>>
>>Another point here is that the defaults *are* reasonable for development
>>and for small installations; the people who are complaining are the ones
>>who expect to run terabyte databases without any tuning. (I exaggerate
>>perhaps, but the point is valid.)
>>
>>We've talked more than once about offering multiple alternative
>>starting-point postgresql.conf files to give people an idea of what to
>>do for small/medium/large installations. MySQL have done that for years
>>and it doesn't seem that users are unable to cope with the concept.
>>But doing this is (a) mostly a matter of testing and documenting, not
>>coding and (b) probably too small for a SoC project anyway.
>>
>>
>
>My recollection was that there was opposition to offering multiple
>config files, but that there was a proposal to make initdb smarter about
>picking configuration values.
>
>Personally, I agree that multiple config files would be fine. Or a
>really fancy solution would be feeding a config option to initdb and
>have it generate an appropriate postgresql.conf.
>
>

We have already done some initdb tuning improvements for 8.2 - shared
buffers now tops out at 4000 instead of 1000 and initdb now sets
max_fsm_pages at a more realistic level. (top is 200,000 instead of
previously hardcoded 20,000).

I would have liked to increase max_connections too, but that would have
caused problems on OSX, apparently. See previous discussion.

Personally I would much rather see a tuning advisor tool in more general
use than just provide small/medium/large config setting files.

cheers

andrew