Schedule - PGConf.DE 2024

WORK_MEM the good, the bad and the ugly

Date: 2024-04-12
Time: 12:50–13:35
Room: Ballsaal 3
Level: Intermediate

Postgres WORK_MEM is an important parameter to control the private memory allocated to the worker process but is not that often discussed in-depth at pgconf / pgday events.

Over the last decade, I have worked on migrations of literally 1000s database clusters (in data centres around the world) from Oracle to Postgres. I'm now working exclusively with Postgres on some exceptionally high workloads.

I have found tuning WORK_MEM generally quite intuitive, but there are some edge cases, and occasionally, things can get very ugly (at least in the DBaaS world).

I will demo the normal tuning processes I use and then go onto some interesting edge cases I have seen.

Finally, I want to cover some defensive programming best practices to avoid ugly edge cases.

Slides

The following slides have been made available for this session:

Speaker

Dave Pitts