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

Tuning with background writer statistics


In this recipe, we will be discussing how PostgreSQL's background writer (bgwriter) process plays an important role in fine tuning PostgreSQL memory and checkpoint related information.

Getting ready

The bgwriter process is a mandatory background process in a PostgreSQL instance. Its main responsibility is to flush the buffers from memory to disk. Besides, it will also keep the shared buffers ready by flushing the least used dirty buffers from memory to disk, based on bgwriter_lru_maxpages, bgwriter_lru_multiplier parameter settings. In PostgreSQL, checkpoint activity is a heavy process, as it is going to flush many dirty buffers into the physical disk, which will increase a great utilization in I/O.

When an explicit/implicit checkpoint is invoked, the bgwriter process will do most of the work. The pg_stat_bgwriter catalog view will show the cumulative statistics of the bgwriter and checkpoint statistics. If we can store this statistical information into...