PostgreSQL at low level: Stay curious
https://learning.oreilly.com/videos/oreilly-velocity-conference/9781492050742/9781492050742-video328387
- Very dense (and quick) talk with a lot of useful information.
- More about general techniques to profile postgres-like systems, and not too much postgres-specific stuff.
- BPF in particular is very interesting; you can effectively attach custom programs to any function of any running program (including the kernel itself), and receive data at runtime.
- With this in the Linux observability toolkit, is FreeBSD really better at this?
- It’s relatively easy to perform debugging at the database level, but the abstractions really layer up and make this more difficult:
- In general, you can use a combination of
{reading the source,perf,strace,BPF} to figure out any performance issue in production, but you have to want to do this and not give up because the idea of observability at this level seems too difficult. - Postgres uses Linux buffered IO, which can cause thrash when memory contention is high (not familiar enough with the details to have a strong intuition about why this is).
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