HOW TO MAKE POKERTRACKER FLY . . . . (well almost)

[tarix]

How often should a grinder that plays around 4000 hands/day defragment?

According to Microsoft research there is little reason to ever do a full defragment. Instead you'll want to do quick defragment which make sure small files are fully defragmented and large files have big contiguous blocks.

In addition you might consider doing a daily vacuum/analyze after you are done playing for the day. That is likely to have a lot more impact on performance than defragmenting.

[Mr Tiger]

tarix (or somebody who knows)
Could you explain what is "max_connections" in postgresql.conf file? By default it is 100 in 9.0 version. How many connections is usually used when running PT3? (HUD, import, housekeeping)?

[kraada]

Each particular thread that is going to make a query takes up a connection. So if you've got the HUD running on two tables, that's two connections. Import is one. If you're running housekeeping later, that's one but the other three might not be still around.

The 9.0 default of 100 should be plenty. We've never had complaints as far as I know with the 8.3 default though.

[leviathan74]

Each particular thread that is going to make a query takes up a connection. So if you've got the HUD running on two tables, that's two connections. Import is one. If you're running housekeeping later, that's one but the other three might not be still around.

Can you double verify that each table counts as a connection? Are you sure it's not each player's HUD, or even each individual stat from a player's HUD that counts as a connection?

That's pretty important because I read that you multiply your max connections with the with work mem you set in order to see the total memory used by work mem.

Speaking of which, if I have 12 stats on hud, how much memory does work mem consume and what's a proper number to set? I ve seen anywhere from 16MB to 128MB.

I am asking all of this, because I ve got a top of the line system (i7, ssd ,32 gb Ram) and when I get to a really high number of tables like let's say 30, it's not as fluid as I would like it to be. It's not lagging mind you. Definitely not crawling. But definitely not as smooth as when I am on 15 tables.

[kraada]

PT3 hasn't changed since the above posting. In PT4 we use connections differently so I'd need to check on the details of this one.

[WhiteRider]

No matter how many tables you have we push all queries through two postgres connections. There are two additional connections used for import. We push the hands through one, and all additional data through another one.

[leviathan74]

Thanks, that's useful. Although I should ask. After I posted, I read that for each connection, postgresql creates a process that you can see on task manager. I definitely have more than two processes running on my task manager for sure, though far less than the 100 max connections set on the config file. Is that true and if yes, how is it explained?

Other than that, if the program uses so few connections, doesn't that mean that work mem should be large? Since I ve got a ton of memory shouldn't I just push it up a ton, even as high as 1 or 2 gigs?

Conversely, shouldn't I lower max connections to 10 or something?

[kraada]

Unused connections don't actually cost that much. PT4 has an automated configuration that works pretty well out of the box for most users -- you can compare what we actually change and if you want to push it a little further, you can certainly try it. The configuration file notes all of our changes.

[leviathan74]

Well, I ve experimented with pt's tuning a lot in the past, but in my experience, the large value it sets for shared buffers (4 gigs in my case) caused lag.

I am experimenting with various settings while importing the same set over and over again, something which admittedly isn't the same as real game conditions, but after looking at PT's settings again, I see that the higher value it sets for temp_buffers gave a marginal boost to import speeds. So that's something.

I also see that you ve set work mem to 512MB in your tuning. I will definitely try large work mem settings then, as both your and the HEM's team recommendation I came across are higher than the one I was using.

[WhiteRider]

There are always multiple PostgreSQL processes running regardless of active connections, because it's always there waiting for work to do. I think there are about 6 normal PostgreSQL processes - they use virtually no resources until they are needed though.