Re: Google SoC--Idea Request

[Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net>]

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