Re: Persistent connections to database?

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

Just to clarify this discussion, I think Joshua's points were somewhat
misunderstood.  They are mostly important when you are running a
dedicated database server and/or expect to have a large number of
concurrent requests.

On Nov 19, 2007 3:54 PM, Gene Ets <..hidden..> wrote:

> Well as it happens, in my case someone else also 'just
> installed Postgres without actually reviewing the conf
> files' - that someone was me.

In most small businesses, there is no problem with doing this, as I am
sure that both Josh's would agree.  The issue specific to Charley's
case has to do with hooking that same accounting software up to system
where you are getting a moderate number of concurrent operations.

For example, the second largest deployment I have maintained (in both
LSMB and SL!) used a stock PostgreSQL configuration with no changes
and no performance issues other than those from issues with the code.
They have about 1.7M rows in acc_trans.
>
> I installed it in order to use LSMB without any real
> knowledge or understanding that I might need to do
> anything with it, let alone review and understand the
> pg config files - which I didnt/dont.
>
> So no offense either, but...
> Given how important it apparently is,  may I suggest
> that it is also a seriously bad idea to release
> accounting software that relies 100% on Postgres to
> unsuspecting users (me) without at least pointing out
> that the config is critical to my accounting system,
> and perhaps even offering some brief pointers as to
> the hows and whys of configuring it correctly.

Just again for clarification, the issue is that PostgreSQL, when it is
installed, has no idea what amount of memory will be available on the
machine.  Hence the initial settings are quite conservative.  If you
only have 1-3 people working on the software at any given time, even
if this is a fairly high volume business (i.e. 2 people entering
invoices 12 hours a day via a cash register), this isn't going to be a
problem.  Note that this default behavior is actually ideal for most
businesses because it means that the database server does drag down
the performance of the machine unnecessarily (so you can run the
software, as I do, on your laptop).

However, if you want to hook LSMB up to a web site where you may have
30-40 concurrent requests coming in, you are going to have to modify
the configuration in order to handle the load.  If this really is a
dedicated database server, you want to tell the software to use all
the available resources.

Hope this helps,
Chris Travers