Re: PG Logging is Slow - Mailing list pgsql-performance

Thank-you Grega,

        I ended up using the pg_ctl -l parameter to write the output to a specified file. Much quicker to do so.

        I tried the -/var/log/postgresql.log option however I noticed no performance improvement. May be the fact that we use redhad linux and syslog, I'm no sys-admin, so I'm not sure if there is a difference between syslogd and syslog.

Theo

-----Original Message-----
From: Grega Bremec [mailto:gregab@p0f.net]
Sent: Monday, 20 December 2004 3:49 PM
To: Theo Galanakis
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [PERFORM] PG Logging is Slow

...and on Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 03:17:11PM +1100, Theo Galanakis used the keyboard:
> Under postgres 7.3 logging is incredibly slow!
>
> I have applied the following settings:
>
> syslog = 2
> syslog_facility = 'LOCAL0'
> syslog_ident = 'postgres'
> 
>  log_connections =  true
> log_duration =  true
> log_pid =  true
> log_statement =  true
> log_timestamp =  true
> 
> This severely impacted the performance of our production system, a
> search page which took 1-3 seconds now takes over 30, is this normal?
> 
> I need to get some performance indicators from our production db,
> however I cant turn on logging with such performance degradation.
> 

Hi Theo,

One thing you should be sure about is that whichever logfile you have configured for the local0 facility is being written to asynchronously. Synchronous logging is REALLY expensive.

If you're using the standard syslogd, you can achieve that by prefixing the filename in syslogd.conf with a dash. For example,

    local0.*            /var/log/postgresql.log

would become

    local0.*            -/var/log/postgresql.log

One other option would be to turn off syslog logging completely and let postmaster take care of the log on its own, which may or may not be possible for you, depending on the policy in effect (remote logging, etc.).

Hope this helped,
--
    Grega Bremec
    gregab at p0f dot net