Ardent Performance Computing
Linux
KubeCon 2025: Bookmarks on Memory and Postgres
Just got home from KubeCon. One of my big goals for the trip was to make some progress in a few areas of postgres and kubernetes – primarily around allowing more flexible use of the linux page cache and avoiding OOM kills with less hardware overprovisioning. When I look at Postgres on Kubernetes, I think … Continue reading
Data Safety on a Budget
Many experienced DBAs joke that you can boil down the entire job to a single rule of thumb: Don’t lose your data. It’s simple, memorable, and absolutely true – albeit a little oversimplified. Mark Porter’s Cultural Hint “The Onion of our Requirements” conveys the same idea with a lot more accuracy: We need to always make sure we … Continue reading
Graviton2 versus Graviton4
Just a short post, because I thought this was pretty remarkable. Below, I have screenshots showing the CPU utilization of two AWS instances in us-west-2 which are running an identical workload. They are running the CloudNativePG playground, which is a production-like learning and testing environment (all running virtually inside the single ec2 instance, which can … Continue reading
Collation Torture Test versus Debian
Collation torture test results are finally finished and uploaded for Debian. https://github.com/ardentperf/glibc-unicode-sorting The test did not pick up any changes in en_US sort order for either Bullseye or Bookworm 🎉️ Buster has glibc 2.28 so it shows lots of changes – as expected. The postgres wiki had claimed that Jessie(8) to Stretch(9) upgrades were safe. … Continue reading
Challenges of Postgres Containers
Many enterprise workloads are being migrated from commercial databases like Oracle and SQL Server to Postgres, which brings anxiety and challenges for mature operational teams. Learning a new database like Postgres sounds intimidating. In practice, most of the concepts directly transfer from databases like SQL Server and Oracle. Transactions, SQL syntax, explain plans, connection management, … Continue reading
Kubernetes Requests and Limits for Postgres
As Joe Drumgoole said a few days ago: so many Postgres providers. Aiven, AWS, Azure, Crunchy, DigitalOcean, EDB, GCP, Heroku, Neon, Nile, Oracle, Supabase, Tembo, Timescale, Xata, Yugabyte… 🤯 I’m sure there’s more I missed. And that’s not even the providers using Postgres underneath services they offer with a different focus than Postgres compatibility. (I … Continue reading
Copy-and-Paste A New Postgres Dev Env In 5 Min
You can cut-and-paste the following commands to quickly get a new & clean dev environment for working with PostgreSQL source code. This includes Michael Paquier’s powerful script kit for managing the PostgreSQL development environment. Setting up from scratch takes me about 5 minutes, plus 3 minutes to configure, compile and install PostgreSQL for testing. Running the … Continue reading
Did Postgres Lose My Data?
Hello, let me introduce myself. Today, we’ll pretend that I’m a linguistics researcher. I don’t know much about databases, but I do know a lot about the Balti language of northern Pakistan. That’s why I’m excited about my current translation project. The most interesting part of this translation project is that I’m doing some computer-driven … Continue reading
Researching the Performance Puzzle
The PostgreSQL Performance Puzzle was, perhaps, too easy – it didn’t take long for someone to guess the correct answer! But I didn’t see much discussion about why the difference or what was happening. My emphasis on the magnitude of the difference was a tip-off that there’s much more than meets the eye with this … Continue reading
PostgreSQL Invalid Page and Checksum Verification Failed
At the Seattle PostgreSQL User Group meetup this past Tuesday, we got onto the topic of invalid pages in PostgreSQL. It was a fun discussion and it made me realize that it’d be worth writing down a bunch of the stuff we talked about – it might be interesting to a few more people too! … Continue reading
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This is my personal website. The views expressed here are mine alone and may not reflect the views of my employer.
contact: schneider @ ardentperf.com
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