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Date: Sun, 5 Dec 2004 21:44:34 +0100 (CET)
From: Claus Guttesen <cguttesen@yahoo.dk>
To: Sean Chittenden <sean@chittenden.org>
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Subject: Re: postgresql on FreeBSD 5.3 and high load
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> Have you looked to see if you're using spin locks or
> not?  Search for 
> "amd64 x86_64 spin lock" in PostgreSQL's archives. 
> I think spin locks 
> were disabled for amd64.  When you're at a load of
> 70, look in 
> pg_catalog.pg_locks to see if you have any ungranted
> locks.

Thank you for your input.

Searched postgresl.org's archives, both wihtin and via
google, but only found information that related
primarily to Linux.

> 
> Also, is your application primarily read?  You may
> want to investigate 
> using pgpool as a way of reducing the overhead for
> connection startup.

There are more reads than writes, but I haven't found
the exact numbers (yet).

> Another option is to use memcached and remove some
> queries from the 
> database all together.  -sc

I will take a look at these utilities, but will wait
until January  next year, where the load have
decreased. Right now I'll throw some more hardware at
it, a quad-opteron  which was planned (in May next
year), and will go through the php-code to optimize.

I increased the shared_buffers to 65536, but it did
not change much. I'll decrease it to 16384. Read a
thread related to 'mbwait postgresql freebsd' which I
found at freebsd's site. This suggested that a (too)
high value could be counterproductive.

regards
Claus