Last night at
BWPUG, Greg Smith gave his talk on “Managing High Volume Writes with Postgres”, which dives deep into the intersection of checkpoint behavior and shared buffers, and also into dealing with vacuum. One of the things I always like about Greg’s talks are it’s a good way to measure what
we’ve learned between reading code and running large scale / highly loaded system in the wild. Even in the cases where we disagree, it’s good to get a different point of view on things. If you manage Postgres systems and get the chance to see this talk, it’s worth taking a look (and I suspect he’ll post the slides up somewhere this week, if they aren’t already available).
One of the other cool things that came out of the talk was one of the guys on my team again validating why we love working with
Circonus. We have an unofficial slogan that with Circonus, “if you can write a query, you can make a graph”. Well, Keith noticed that we didn’t have any monitoring for the background writer info on one of our recently upgraded from 8.3->9.1 multi-TB Postgres, so he jump into Circonus and just like that, we had metrics and a graph faster than Greg could move off the slide. This will be awesome once we accumulate some more data, but here’s a screenshot I took from last night while we were in the talk:
Yay graphs!
Update: Shortly after posting, Keith mentioned that he had updated the graph to speak in MB rather than Buffers. So, here is an updated screenshot with friendlier output and more data. (Note that Phil, one of our other DBA’s, also flipped the buffers allocated to a right axis as well).
