"Mark Cave-Ayland" <m.cave-ayland@webbased.co.uk> writes:
> Reducing bgwriter_maxpages definitely seems to have helped with the larger
> values for shared_buffers. However, during the test I was still seeing large
> pauses that occurred at a rate that seemed inversely proportional to the
> number of shared buffers. So with shared buffers set to 1000, the pgbench
> test would 'pause' roughly every 5s for about 2-3s before continuing as
> quickly as before. With shared buffers set to 100000 there were only 2 or 3
> 2-3s pauses during the entire duration of the test. As a rule of thumb, it
> looked like the pauses occurred during update statements of the form "update
> a set b = b + 1". Is the bgwriter supposed to eliminate these type of pauses
> altogether?
What do you mean by "pause" exactly? pgbench doesn't emit any output
during a run so I'm not sure what you are watching.
regards, tom lane