Re: Overhauling GUCS

Tom Lane wrote:
> If those aren't enough questions, what else must we ask? Or maybe they
> aren't the right questions at all --- maybe we should ask "is this a
> dedicated machine or not" and try to extrapolate everything else from
> what we (hopefully) can find out about the hardware.
>
I think probably a combination of high and low-level questions and make
the low-level (more specific) questions optional since some users may
not be able to provide low-level info. Here's a rough idea of how I
envision this tool should work.

$ pg_config_wizard

Is this machine dedicated to Postgres? (y/n) n (now tool
auto-discovers available HW resources)
Your system has 32GB memory. What percentage do you want to allocate to
Postgres? (1=50%, 2=33%, 3=25%, etc) 1
What type of workload? (OLTP, DSS, etc)
...

At the end, the tool runs for a while checking to see if certain
thresholds are reached to determine which parameters need to be
increased. The tool would change the parameters causing the
bottlenecks, rerun Postgres/workload, and iterate a few times until the
results are satfisfactory. Write the recommended settings to
postgresql.conf.recommend and let the user update postgresql.conf
himself or whatever.

I update my postgresql.conf, rerun the app and see 100% increased in
throughput :-)

-Robert