Book Image

PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition - Third Edition

Book Image

PostgreSQL Administration Cookbook, 9.5/9.6 Edition - Third Edition

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is a powerful opensource database management system; now recognized as the expert's choice for a wide range of applications, it has an enviable reputation for performance and stability. PostgreSQL provides an integrated feature set comprising relational database features, object-relational, text search, Geographical Info Systems, analytical tools for big data and JSON/XML document management. Starting with short and simple recipes, you will soon dive into core features, such as configuration, server control, tables, and data. You will tackle a variety of problems a database administrator usually encounters, from creating tables to managing views, from improving performance to securing your database, and from using monitoring tools to using storage engines. Recipes based on important topics such as high availability, concurrency, replication, backup and recovery, as well as diagnostics and troubleshooting are also given special importance. By the end of this book, you will have all the knowledge you need to run, manage, and maintain PostgreSQL efficiently.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Monitoring and tuning vacuum

If you're currently waiting for a long running vacuum (or autovacuum) to finish, go straight to the How to do it... section.

If you've just had a long running vacuum then you may want to think about setting a few parameters.

Getting ready

autovacuum_max_workers should always be set to more than 2. Setting it too high may not be very useful, so be careful.

Setting vacuum_cost_delay too high is counterproductive. VACUUM is your friend, not your enemy, so delaying it until it doesn't happen at all just makes things worse.

maintenance_work_mem should be set to anything up to 1GB, according to how much memory you can allocate to this task at this time.

Let's watch what happens when...