Book Image

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

By : Chitij Chauhan, Dinesh Kumar
Book Image

PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook

By: Chitij Chauhan, Dinesh Kumar

Overview of this book

PostgreSQL is one of the most powerful and easy to use database management systems. It has strong support from the community and is being actively developed with a new release every year. PostgreSQL supports the most advanced features included in SQL standards. It also provides NoSQL capabilities and very rich data types and extensions. All of this makes PostgreSQL a very attractive solution in software systems. If you run a database, you want it to perform well and you want to be able to secure it. As the world’s most advanced open source database, PostgreSQL has unique built-in ways to achieve these goals. This book will show you a multitude of ways to enhance your database’s performance and give you insights into measuring and optimizing a PostgreSQL database to achieve better performance. This book is your one-stop guide to elevate your PostgreSQL knowledge to the next level. First, you’ll get familiarized with essential developer/administrator concepts such as load balancing, connection pooling, and distributing connections to multiple nodes. Next, you will explore memory optimization techniques before exploring the security controls offered by PostgreSQL. Then, you will move on to the essential database/server monitoring and replication strategies with PostgreSQL. Finally, you will learn about query processing algorithms.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
PostgreSQL High Performance Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Monitoring paging and swapping


In this recipe, we are going to use the sar and vmstat commands with options to monitor paging and swapping operations.

Getting ready

It is necessary to monitor the amount of paging and swapping happening on the operating system. Paging occurs when a part of the operating system process gets transferred from physical memory to disk, or is read back from physical memory to disk. Swapping occurs when an entire process gets transferred to disk, from physical memory to disk, or is read back into physical memory from disk. Depending on the system, either paging or swapping could be an issue. If paging is occurring normally, and if you see a trend of heavy swapping, then the issue could be related to insufficient memory or sometimes the issue could be related to disk as well. If the system is heavily paging and not swapping, the issue could be related to either CPU or memory.

How to do it...

We could use the vmstat and sar command with the following to monitor the paging...