Re: Blocked updates and background writer performance

Maybe you're not doing this.... but:
Using "data" json(b)/hstore column for all/most/many fields is an antipattern. Use 'data' ONLY for columns that you know will be dynamic.

This way you'll write less data into static-columns (no key-names overhead and better types) --> less data to disk etc (selects will also be faster).

On Tue, Jan 12, 2016 at 7:25 PM, Cory Tucker <cory.tucker@gmail.com> wrote:

PG 9.4.4 (RDS)

I'm experiencing an issue when trying to update many rows in a single table (one row at a time, but parallelized across ~12 connections).  The issue we see is that the writes will periodically be blocked for a duration of several minutes and then pick back up.  After digging through our monitoring stack, I was able to uncover these stats which seem to allude to it being a background writer performance problem:

(apologies for the image)

Our settings for the background writer are pretty standard OOB (I threw in some others that I thought might be helpful, too):

          name           | setting | unit

-------------------------+---------+------

 bgwriter_delay          | 200     | ms

 bgwriter_lru_maxpages   | 100     |

 bgwriter_lru_multiplier | 2       |

 maintenance_work_mem    | 65536   | kB

 max_worker_processes    | 8       |

 work_mem                | 32768   | kB

The table that is being written to contains a jsonb column with a GIN index:

            Table "public.ced"

    Column     |           Type           | Modifiers

---------------+--------------------------+-----------

 id            | bigint                   | not null

 created_at    | timestamp with time zone |

 modified_at   | timestamp with time zone |

 bean_version  | bigint                   | default 0

 account_id    | bigint                   | not null

 data          | jsonb                    | not null

Indexes:

    "ced_pkey" PRIMARY KEY, btree (id)

    "ced_data" gin (data jsonb_path_ops)

    "partition_key_idx" btree (account_id, id)

It seems to me that the background writer just can't keep up with the amount of writes that I am trying to do and freezes all the updates. What are my options to improve the background writer performance here?

thanks

--Cory