Re: random_page_costs - are defaults of 4.0 realistic for SCSI RAID 1 - Mailing list pgsql-performance

From Scott Marlowe
Subject Re: random_page_costs - are defaults of 4.0 realistic for SCSI RAID 1
Date
Msg-id dcc563d10709101459o11451c33y8cab7dcf1e00a93f@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: random_page_costs - are defaults of 4.0 realistic for SCSI RAID 1  (Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com>)
Responses Re: random_page_costs - are defaults of 4.0 realistic for SCSI RAID 1  (Mark Mielke <mark@mark.mielke.cc>)
List pgsql-performance
On 9/10/07, Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
>
> "Luke Lonergan" <llonergan@greenplum.com> writes:
>
> > Should be a lot higher, something like 10-15 is approximating accurate.
>
> Most people's experience is that due to Postgres underestimating the benefits
> of caching lowering the random_page_cost is helpful.

Quite often the real problem is that they have effective_cache_size
too small, and they use random_page_cost to get the planner to switch
to index scans on small tables.  With a large effective_cache_size and
small to moderate table (i.e. it fits in memory pretty handily) the
planner seems much better in the last few major releases about picking
an index over a sequential scan.

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