Re: Auto-tuning work_mem and maintenance_work_mem

On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 8:02 PM, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> I think the simplest solution would be to have a parameter to initdb
> which specifies how much memory you want to use, and set a new variable
> available_mem from that, and have things auto-tune based on that value
> in the backend.

Have you tried pgtune?

http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgtune/

It's an extremely simple program - about 500 lines of python. It asks
a few simple questions, and does as good a job of configuring Postgres
as most installations will ever need. Importantly, it asks the user to
characterize their workload as one of the following: DW, OLTP, Web,
Mixed and Desktop. Why can't we just do something along those lines?

I know that I constantly find myself rattling off folk wisdom about
how to set the most important GUCs. I'm not alone here [1]. Isn't it
about time we just automated this?

[1] http://rhaas.blogspot.com/2012/03/tuning-sharedbuffers-and-walbuffers.html
--
Peter Geoghegan