Overhead in PostgreSQL
Introduction In computer science and systems engineering, overhead is not a bug, but it is a phenomenon of system resource waste. Overhead is the amount of time, memory, bandwidth or CPU power consumed to manage or operate the system, rather than contributing directly to the actual data processing results. In database management systems, overhead occurs very frequently. Especially, if the system suffers from excessive memory (RAM) overhead, the Operating System (OS) will trigger a mechanism to kill that process to save the server. Common Types of Overhead in Postgres Postgres has a process-based architecture, meaning each client connection generates an independent process, so it easily encounters the following types of overhead: Connection Overhead: If you have 500 concurrent connections, Postgres will create 500 processes. The fact that the CPU must constantly context switch among these 500 processes creates a massive amount of overhead, significantly reducing performance. Memory Over...