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 system load


Many a times there are situations when the application users start complaining about the database performance being slow and as a DBA you need to determine whether there are system resource bottlenecks on the PostgreSQL server. Running the vmstat command can help us to quickly locate and identify the bottlenecks on the server.

How to do it...

The vmstat command is used to report real-time performance statistics about processes, memory, paging, disk I/O, and CPU consumption. The following is the usage of the vmstat command:

$ vmstat 
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- ----cpu---- 
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa 
14 0 52340 25272 3068 1662704 0 0 63 76 9 31 15 1 84 0  

In the preceding output, the first line divides the columns on the second line into six different categories, which are discussed in the following list:

  • The first category is the process (procs) and it contains the following columns...