Re: too much pgbench init output

On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 11:31 PM, Peter Eisentraut <peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net> wrote:
> On Tue, 2012-09-04 at 23:14 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
>> Actually, this whole things seems like a solution in search of a
>> problem to me. We just reduced the verbosity of pgbench -i tenfold in
>> the very recent past - I would have thought that enough to address
>> this problem. But maybe not.
>
> The problem is that
>
> a) It blasts out too much output and everything scrolls off the screen,
> and
>
> b) There is no indication of where the end is.
>
> These are independent problems, and I'd be happy to address them
> separately if there are such specific concerns attached to this.
>
> Speaking of tenfold, we could reduce the output frequency tenfold to
> once every 1000000, which would alleviate this problem for a while
> longer.

Well, I wouldn't object to displaying a percentage on each output
line. But I don't really like the idea of having them less frequent
than they already are, because if you run into a situation that makes
pgbench -i run slowly, as I occasionally do, it's marginal to tell the
difference between "slow" and "completely hung" even with the current
level of verbosity.

However, we could add a -q flag to run more quietly, or something like
that. Actually, I'd even be fine with making the default quieter,
though we can't use -v for verbose since that's already taken. But
I'd like to preserve the option of getting the current amount of
output because sometimes I need that to troubleshoot problems.
Actually it'd be nice to even get a bit more output: say, a timestamp
on each line, and a completion percentage... but now I'm getting
greedy.

--
Robert Haas
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