Uber's workload at the time, ironically, was not enough to make a postgresql server running moderately decent hardware to fall over if you actually read the manual.
Uber's engineering team will never be able to live this down.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4vms8x/why_we_...
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/5797D5A1.5030009%40agl...
> The Uber guy is right that InnoDB handles this better as long as you don't touch the primary key (primary key updates in InnoDB are really bad).
> This is a common problem case we don't have an answer for yet.
It's still not how I remember it.
Quote from https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/579795DF.10502%40...
I still prefer Postgres by a long way as a developer experience, for the sophistication of the SQL you can write and the smarts in the optimizer. And I'd still pick MySQL for an app which expects to grow to huge quantities of data, because of the path to Vitesse.
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-resou... tells you what all the parameters do, but not why and how to change them.
"If you have a dedicated database server with 1GB or more of RAM, a reasonable starting value for shared_buffers is 25% of the memory in your system." Why not set it to 25% of the memory in my system by default, then?
"Sets the base maximum amount of memory to be used by a query operation (such as a sort or hash table) before writing to temporary disk files. If this value is specified without units, it is taken as kilobytes. The default value is four megabytes (4MB)." Yes, and? Should I set it higher? When?
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Tuning_Your_PostgreSQL_Serv... hasn't been updated for two years and explains only a handful of parameters.
"If you do a lot of complex sorts, and have a lot of memory, then increasing the work_mem parameter allows PostgreSQL to do larger in-memory sorts which, unsurprisingly, will be faster than disk-based equivalents." How much is a lot? Do I need to care if I'm running mostly OLTP queries?
"This is a setting where data warehouse systems, where users are submitting very large queries, can readily make use of many gigabytes of memory." Okay, so I need to set it higher if I'm running OLAP queries. But how high is too high?
https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Performance_Optimization is just a collection of blog posts written by random (probably smart) people that may or may not be outdated.
So when someone complains their Postgres instance runs like ass and smug Postgres weenies tell them to git gud at tuning, they should be less smug, because if your RDBMS requires extensive configuration to support nontrivial loads, you either make this configuration the default one or, if it's significantly different for different load profiles, put a whole section in the manual that covers day 1 and day 2 operations.
That the defaults don't handle top users is hardly an issue.