Re: how to slow down parts of Pg - Mailing list pgsql-general

I have an unusual need:  I need Pg to slow down. I know, we all want our DB to go faster, but in this case it's speed is working against me in 1 area.

 

We have systems that are geo-redundant for HA, with the redundancy being handled by DRBD to keep the disks in sync, which it does at the block level. For normal operations, it actually works out fairly well. That said, we recognize that what we really need to do is one of the forms of streaming (ch 26 of the manual) which I believe would help this problem a lot if not solve it -- but we don't have the time to do that at the moment. I plan and hope to get there by the end of the year. The part that hurts so bad is when we do maintenance operations that are DB heavy, like deleting really old records out of archives (weekly), moving older records from current tables to archive tables plus an analyze (every night), running pg_backup (every night), other archiving (weekly), and vacuum full to remove bloat (once a quarter). All of this generates a lot of disk writes, to state the obvious.

 

The local server can handle it all just fine, but the network can't handle it as it tries to sync to the other server. Sometimes we can add network bandwidth, many times we can't as it depends on others. To borrow a phrase from the current times, we need to flatten the curve. 😊

 

A few parts of our maintenance process I've tamed by doing "nice -20" on the process (e.g. log rotation); but I can't really do that for Pg because the work gets handed off to a background process that's not a direct child process … and I don't want to slow the DB as a whole because other work is going on (like handling incoming data).

 

Part of the process I've slowed down by doing the work in chunks of 10K rows at a time with a pause between each chunk to allow the network to catch up (instead of an entire table in 1 statement). This sort of works, but some work/SQL is between hard to next-to-impossible to break up like that. That also produces some hard spikes, but that's better than the alternative (next sentence). Still, large portions of the process are hard to control and just punch the network to full capacity and hold it there for far too long.

 

So, do I have any other options to help slow down some of the Pg operations? Or maybe some other short-term mitigations we can do with Pg configurations? Or is this a case where we've already done all we can do and the only answer is move to WAL streaming as fast as possible?

 

If it matters, this is being run on Linux servers. Pg 12.2 is in final testing and will be rolled out to production soon -- so feel free to offer suggestions that only apply to 12.x.

 

Thanks,

Kevin

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