Re: Performance monitor signal handler

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
Cc: Samuel Sieb <samuel@sieb.net>, Jan Wieck <JanWieck@Yahoo.com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2001-03-17T17:38:36Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> The only open issue is per-table stuff, and I would like to see some
> circular buffer implemented to handle that, with a collection process
> that has access to shared memory.

That will get us into locking/contention issues.  OTOH, frequent trips
to the kernel to send stats messages --- regardless of the transport
mechanism chosen --- don't seem all that cheap either.

> Even better, have an SQL table updated with the per-table stats
> periodically.

That will be horribly expensive, if it's a real table.

I think you missed the point that somebody made a little while ago
about waiting for functions that can return tuple sets.  Once we have
that, the stats tables can be *virtual* tables, ie tables that are
computed on-demand by some function.  That will be a lot less overhead
than physically updating an actual table.

			regards, tom lane