Optimizing Postgresql server and FreeBSD for heavy read and writes - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Amitabh Kant
Subject Optimizing Postgresql server and FreeBSD for heavy read and writes
Date
Msg-id 84b68b3d1002030710x76c31adft58c56624409011fd@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: Optimizing Postgresql server and FreeBSD for heavy read and writes  (Ivan Voras <ivoras@freebsd.org>)
Re: Optimizing Postgresql server and FreeBSD for heavy read and writes  (Andy Colson <andy@squeakycode.net>)
Re: Optimizing Postgresql server and FreeBSD for heavy read and writes  (Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>)
List pgsql-performance
Hello

I have a server dedicated for Postgres with the following specs:

RAM 16GB, 146GB SAS (15K) x 4 -  RAID 10 with BBU, Dual Xeon  E5345  @ 2.33GHz 
OS: FreeBSD 8.0

It runs multiple (approx 10) databases ranging from 500MB to over 24 GB in size. All of them are of the same structure, and almost all of them have very heavy read and writes.

pgtune (http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pgtune/) suggests the settings to be changed as :

maintenance_work_mem = 960MB # pg_generate_conf wizard 2010-02-03
checkpoint_completion_target = 0.9 # pg_generate_conf wizard 2010-02-03
effective_cache_size = 11GB # pg_generate_conf wizard 2010-02-03
work_mem = 160MB # pg_generate_conf wizard 2010-02-03
wal_buffers = 8MB # pg_generate_conf wizard 2010-02-03
checkpoint_segments = 16 # pg_generate_conf wizard 2010-02-03
shared_buffers = 3840MB # pg_generate_conf wizard 2010-02-03
max_connections = 100 # pg_generate_conf wizard 2010-02-03


While this gives me the changes for postgresql.conf, I am not sure of  of the chnages that I need to make in FreeBSD to support such large memory allocations. The last time I tried, Postgres refused to start and I had to fall back to the default settings.

I would appreciate if somebody could point out the sysctl/loader.conf settings that I need to have in FreeBSD.

With regards

Amitabh Kant

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