what is a "working set" ?

Started by Aleksey Tsalolikhinalmost 14 years ago2 messagesdocs
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#1Aleksey Tsalolikhin
atsaloli.tech@gmail.com

Hi. I'm trying to find a definition of "working set", it seems
important for performance tuning, but I cannot find a PostgreSQL
document defining it.

Yours,
Aleksey

#2Bruce Momjian
bruce@momjian.us
In reply to: Aleksey Tsalolikhin (#1)
Re: what is a "working set" ?

On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 04:43:25PM -0700, Aleksey Tsalolikhin wrote:

Hi. I'm trying to find a definition of "working set", it seems
important for performance tuning, but I cannot find a PostgreSQL
document defining it.

That is a great question, and I plan to write a blog about it soon.
Working set is from the mainframe days and tries to represent how much
data you "touch" during a specified period of time, e.g. a 5-minute
working set is the amount of data you typically access (and maybe write)
in a 5-minute period. It is _very_ hard to get that information right
now from Postgres, and getting that information for a typical Unix
process isn't easy either.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +