On Wed, 13 Aug 2008, Michael Nacos wrote:

Hi there... Configuration autotuning is something I am really interested in.
I have seen this page: http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GUCS_Overhaul and
a couple of emails mentioning this, so I wanted to ask is someone already
on it? If yes, I'd like to contribute.

Good time to give a status report on what's been going on with all this.

With some help I just finished off an answer to problem #1 there recently, "Most people have no idea how to set these". There was some concern here that work was being done on config tools without a clear vision of what was going to be tuned. See http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Tuning_Your_PostgreSQL_Server for an intro on how to set the 18 most important parameters (+7 logging parameters) based on the best information I'm aware of.

Circa June, Steve Atkins was looking into writing a C++/Qt GUI tuning interface application, with the idea that somebody else would figure out the actual smarts to the tuning effort. Don't know where that's at.

Josh Berkus and I have been exchanging some ideas for the GUC internals overhaul and had a quick discussion about that in person last month. We've been gravitating toward putting all the extra information we'd like to push into there in an extra catalog table (pg_settings_info or something). The stuff the server needs to start can stay right where it is right now, all the other decoration can move to the table.

Ideally, an external little app should also provide recommendations based
on current database usage statistics -- wouldn't this constitute something
akin to application-specific advice?

Yes, there's a grand plan for a super-wizard that queries the database for size, index, and statistics information for figure out what to do; I've been beating that drum for a while now. Unfortunately, the actual implementation is blocked behind the dreadfully boring work of sorting out how to organize and manage the GUC information a bit better, and the moderately boring work of building a UI for modifying things. If you were hoping to work on the sexy autotuning parts without doing some of the grunt work, let me know if you can figure out how so I can follow you.

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* Greg Smith [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

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