Re: Redesigning checkpoint_segments

On 06/06/2013 03:21 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>
> Not to be unkind but the problems of the uniformed certainly are not
> the problems of the informed. Or perhaps they are certainly the
> problems of the informed :P.
I'm not convinced that's a particularly good argument not to improve
something. Sure, it might be a usability issue not a purely technical
issue, but that IMO doesn't make it much less worth fixing.

Bad usability puts people off early, before they can become productive
and helpful community members. It also puts others off trying the
software at all by reputation alone.

In any case, I don't think this is an issue of the informed vs
uninformed. It's also a matter of operational sanity at scale. "The
sysadmin" can't watch 100,000 individual servers and jump in to make
minute tweaks - nor should they have to when some auto-tuning could
obviate the need.

The same issue exists with vacuum - it's hard for basic users to
understand, so they misconfigure it and often achieve the opposite
results to what they need. It's been getting better, but some
feedback-based control would make a world of difference when running Pg.

In this I really have to agree with Hekki and Daniel - more usable and
preferably feedback-tuned defaults would be really, really nice to have,
though I'd want good visibility (logging, SHOW commands, etc) into what
they were doing and options to override for special cases.

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services