performance Archives - 2ndQuadrant

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Researching PostGIS slowness (2019 edition)

February 27, 2020/2 Comments/in 2ndQuadrant, Alvaro's PlanetPostgreSQL, PostgreSQL /by Álvaro Herrera

Just as last year was ending, one of our long-time customers came to us because one of their long-existing PostgreSQL queries involving PostGIS geometry calculations was much slower for specific values. We researched the problem and found out how to solve it; read on! What we found as the cause of the problem will surprise […]

PostgreSQL 12: Partitioning is now faster

September 17, 2019/4 Comments/in 2ndQuadrant, David's PlanetPostgreSQL /by David Rowley

Table partitioning has been evolving since the feature was added to PostgreSQL in version 10. Version 11 saw some vast improvements, as I mentioned in a previous blog post. During the PostgreSQL 12 development cycle, there was a big focus on scaling partitioning to make it not only perform better, but perform better with a […]

PG Phriday: Postgres 12 Revs up Vacuum

September 6, 2019/0 Comments/in Shaun's PlanetPostgreSQL /by Shaun Thomas

Any long-time user of Postgres is likely familiar with VACUUM, the process that ensures old data tuples are identified and reused to prevent unchecked database bloat. This critical element of maintenance has slowly, but surely, undergone incremental enhancements with each subsequent release. Postgres 12 is no different in this regard. In fact, there are two […]

Sequential UUID Generators on SSD

January 9, 2019/4 Comments/in 2ndQuadrant, Tomas' PlanetPostgreSQL /by Tomas Vondra

After I shared the sequential UUID benchmarks a couple of weeks ago, one of the points raised in feedback was the choice of the storage space. I’ve intentionally used a fairly weak storage system (RAID10 on three 7.2k SATA drives) because I wanted to demonstrate the benefits. But a couple of readers suggested using SSDs might significantly reduce […]

On Rocks and Sand

September 21, 2018/8 Comments/in Shaun's PlanetPostgreSQL /by Shaun Thomas

When working with database capacity planning, there are a lot of variables to consider, and Postgres is no different in this regard. One of the elements which requires management is storage. However, there’s an aspect of storage that escapes inspection almost without exception, and it’s hiding in the shadows between the columns themselves. Alignment Basics […]

PostgreSQL Meltdown Benchmarks

March 4, 2018/0 Comments/in 2ndQuadrant, PostgreSQL, Tomas' PlanetPostgreSQL /by Tomas Vondra

Two serious security vulnerabilities (code named Meltdown and Spectre) were revealed a couple of weeks ago. Initial tests suggested the performance impact of mitigations (added in the kernel) might be up to ~30% for some workloads, depending on the syscall rate. Those early estimates had to be done quickly, and so were based on limited […]

PostgreSQL Meltdown

January 10, 2018/0 Comments/in Simon's PlanetPostgreSQL /by Simon Riggs

Spectre and Meltdown have caused severe alarm in recent days. You may have read about up to 30% impact on PostgreSQL databases, which I believe to be overstated because of misunderstandings in the media. Let’s dig into this in more detail. TL;DR Summary: no PostgreSQL patch required, -7% performance hit In response to these new […]

Benchmark on a Parallel Processing Monster!

February 28, 2017/8 Comments/in David's PlanetPostgreSQL /by David Rowley

Last year I wrote about a benchmark which I performed on the Parallel Aggregate feature that I worked on for PostgreSQL 9.6. I was pretty excited to see this code finally ship in September last year, however something stood out on the release announcement that I didn’t quite understand: Scale Up with Parallel Query Version 9.6 […]

Basics of Tuning Checkpoints

November 8, 2016/7 Comments/in 2ndQuadrant, PostgreSQL, Tomas' PlanetPostgreSQL /by Tomas Vondra

On systems doing non-trivial number of writes, tuning checkpoints is crucial for getting good performance. Yet checkpoints are one of the areas where we often identify confusion and configuration issues, both on the community mailing lists and during performance tuning reviews for our customers. (The other one being autovacuum, discussed a few days ago by […]

Postgres-XL Scalability for Loading Data

October 24, 2016/2 Comments/in Pavan's PlanetPostgreSQL /by Pavan Deolasee

In my last blog, we looked at the benchmark results from bulk load test for a Postgres-XL database cluster. Using a 16-datanode, 2-coordinator cluster, running on EC2 instances, we could easily clock 9M rows/sec or 3TB/hr of ingestion rate. That’s a significant number in itself. In this blog, we’ll see if the ingestion rate is […]