Postgresapp: Horrible CREATE DATABASE Performance in High Sierra

Created on 30 Sep 2017 · 7Comments · Source: PostgresApp/PostgresApp

I just recently "upgraded" to High Sierra and experiencing horrendous CREATE DATABASE performance. Creating a database from a 3G template DB used to take ~1m but post-upgrade is taking ~22m at a sustained write of around 4MB/s. Occasionally, attempting to create an empty database hangs indefinitely as well. When this happens, restarting the Postgres server allows empty database initialization in ~1s.

I'm running on an encrypted APFS volume, but am currently decrypting it to determine if it's somehow related. Previous Sierra volume was HFS+ encrypted.

A multi-threaded pg_restore seems to sustain writes of ~38M/s and completes in about the same time as pre-upgrade (Sierra), so I'm not sure it's entirely related to APFS / disk IO.

I've completely rebuilt the Postgres data directory, re-installed Postgres.app (2.0.5) etc. I don't have any reasonable explanation for what could have broken so catastrophically.

Has anyone else experienced this issue or have any insight as to what could be happening?

Source

booleanbetrayal

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Most helpful comment

This is apparently a major regression and is trackable on this thread - https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/13746.1506974083%40sss.pgh.pa.us#13746.1506974083@sss.pgh.pa.us

booleanbetrayal on 2 Oct 2017

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All 7 comments

Dropping encryption (FileVault) has dropped the total task time to ~15m which is still a far cry from the ~1m it used to take.

booleanbetrayal on 2 Oct 2017

FWIW, I'm seeing this as well after upgrading to High Sierra. Unencrypted APFS.

The specific command I'm running is createdb -T <existing database> <copied database name>. Prior to upgrade, it took 1-2 minutes; now, at least 15 minutes.

barillax on 2 Oct 2017

Thanks for reporting this! It would probably be best to report this issue to the hackers mailing list:
[email protected] -- that's where people who can most likely help you hang out.