Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
47 lines (39 loc) · 2.29 KB

pgcenter-profile-readme.md

File metadata and controls

47 lines (39 loc) · 2.29 KB
Raw

README: pgcenter profile

pgcenter profile is the tool for profiling wait events occured during queries execution.

General information

In cases of long query, you might be interested what this query does. Using EXPLAIN utility you can observe detailed query execution plan. But if query spends time in waitings EXPLAIN will not show that. Using pgcenter profile you can see what wait events occur during query execution. Below an example of wait events occured in heavy UPDATE query on system with poor IO performance:

------ ------------ -----------------------------
% time      seconds wait_event                     query: update pgbench_accounts set abalance = abalance + 100;
------ ------------ -----------------------------
72.15     30.205671 IO.DataFileRead
20.10      8.415921 Running
5.50       2.303926 LWLock.WALWriteLock
1.28       0.535915 IO.DataFileWrite
0.54       0.225117 IO.WALWrite
0.36       0.152407 IO.WALInitSync
0.03       0.011429 IO.WALInitWrite
0.03       0.011355 LWLock.WALBufMappingLock
------ ------------ -----------------------------
99.99     41.861741

In the example, you can see that a most of time is spent on awaiting IO when reading data files.

Exploring your queries with pgcenter profiler you can see many other interesting things.

Main functions

  • using pid, wait_event_type, wait_event from pg_stat_activity statistics for profiling;
  • specify the PID for profiling a specific Postgres backend;
  • change the frequency of profiling interval; default is 100, means to profile with 10ms interval.

Limitations

  • Wait events has been introduced in Postgres 9.6, hence the profiling is possible for 9.6 and newer versions of Postgres.
  • Profiling is not accounting wait events for parallel workers, because there is no guaranteed way to associate master process with its workers.

Usage

Run profile and specify backend PID which want to profile to:

pgcenter profile -U postgres -P 12345

See other usage examples here.