PostgreSQL Performance Tuning Tips

PostgreSQL performance tuning helps in database maintenance and update. It allows you to speed up your database and optimize PostgreSQL performance. Otherwise, your databases and queries will slow down over time and affect application performance. Here are the top 5 PostgreSQL performance tuning tips to help you optimize your databases and tables.

Best PostgreSQL Performance Tuning Tips

Here are some simple PostgreSQL performance tuning tips to help you improve database performance.

1. Using ANALYZE

When we run a SQL query in PostgreSQL, it creates a query plan after parsing your query string, and based on certain database metrics and statistics that it collects based on all queries that it has run so far. These metrics need to be updated periodically, to ensure that PostgreSQL creates query execution plan based on latest information and data.

ANALYZE command allows PostgreSQL to update these statistics based on latest table schema, indexes and other information. This improves query speed and performance. So every time you update table or schema, or add/update index, make sure that to run ANALYZE command.

2. Using EXPLAIN ANALYZE

EXPLAIN command explains how the PostgreSQL query planner will execute your SQL query, which joins it will use, how it will extract data, and estimated rows of information in result.

When used with ANALYZE command it even provides the amount of time each of these query operations will take. It will also tell you which operations will be done in-memory. This is very useful in identifying performance bottlenecks and optimization opportunities.

3. Using Slow Query Log

PostgreSQL even provides the ability to log slow running queries. By logging long running queries into log file, you can easily identify which queries take most of your server’s time.

Here are the detailed steps to enable slow query log in PostgreSQL.

4. Using Indexing

Indexes make it easy for PostgreSQL to do lookups which are useful for WHERE conditions and JOINS. Otherwise, each of these conditions will lead to a full table lookup, which is time consuming.

PostgreSQL supports various types of indexes such as B-Tree (default), Hash, GiST, SP-GiST, and GIN. Here are the detailed steps to create PostgreSQL index.

5. Increase maximum connections

By default, PostgreSQL supports a maximum of 100 concurrent connections. This is stored in max_connections server variable. You can increase this number to support more concurrent connections and keep users from waiting. However, each connection consumes memory, so don’t increase it, unless required.

Some more performance tips

You must also consider regularly updating your PostgreSQL to the latest version. Each update is faster than its predecessor and contains important performance updates.

Similarly, if possible, run your database and application on different servers. Many times, application bugs consume a lot of memory and slow down the memory available to run database queries.

Hopefully, the above performance tuning tips will help you improve PostgreSQL speed and performance.