Getting started with benchmarking

Postgres FM

Michael and Nikolay are joined by Melanie Plageman, database internals engineer at Microsoft and major contributor and committer to PostgreSQL, to discuss getting started with benchmarking — how it differs for users and developers of Postgres, how and when it comes up during development, some tools and lessons, as well as what she's working on at the moment.
Here are some links to things they mentioned:

• Melanie Plageman https://postgres.fm/people/melanie-plageman
• Meanie’s Introduction to Benchmarking With pgbench talk slides https://postgresql.us/events/pgconfnyc2023/schedule/session/1410-introduction-to-benchmarking-with-pgbench/#slides
• Melanie’s Visualizing Postgres I/O Performance for Development talk recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxyPZHG5beI
• Melanie’s Visualizing Postgres I/O Performance for Development talk slides https://speakerdeck.com/melanieplageman/o-performance-for-development
• pgbench https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgbench.html
• Mark Callaghan’s blog https://smalldatum.blogspot.com
• Some of Tomas Vondra’s blog posts https://www.2ndquadrant.com/en/blog/author/tomas-vondra
• Some of Andres Freund’s blog posts https://www.citusdata.com/blog/authors/andres-freund/
• An example of Alexander Lakhin’s work https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/b32bed1b-0746-9b20-1472-4bdc9ca66d52%40gmail.com
• Simplifying the TPC Benchmark C, an OLTP Workload (talk by Mark Wong) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi0I74urLoY
• Matplotlib https://matplotlib.org
• pandas https://pandas.pydata.org
• pg_stat_io https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/monitoring-stats.html#MONITORING-PG-STAT-IO-VIEW
• pg_stat_io commit https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit;h=a9c70b46dbe152e094f137f7e6ba9cd3a638ee25
• pg_buffercache https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/pgbuffercache.html
• tmpfs https://docs.kernel.org/filesystems/tmpfs.html
• Eager page freeze criteria mailing list thread https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAAKRu_b3tpbdRPUPh1Q5h35gXhY%3DspH2ssNsEsJ9sDfw6%3DPEAg%40mail.gmail.com
• The path to using AIO in postgres (talk by Andres Freund) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX50xrHwQa4
• Improve dead tuple storage for lazy vacuum (Masahiko Sawada) https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/[e-mail]

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What did you like or not like? What should we discuss next time? Let us know via a YouTube comment, on social media, or by commenting on our Google doc!

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Postgres FM is produced by:

• Michael Christofides, founder of pgMustard
• Nikolay Samokhvalov, founder of Postgres.ai

With special thanks to:

• Jessie Draws for the elephant artwork