{"id":922,"date":"2020-12-09T11:18:06","date_gmt":"2020-12-09T10:18:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.streppone.it\/cosimo\/blog\/?p=922"},"modified":"2020-12-09T11:23:19","modified_gmt":"2020-12-09T10:23:19","slug":"pgtop-a-top-clone-for-postgresql","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.streppone.it\/cosimo\/blog\/2020\/12\/pgtop-a-top-clone-for-postgresql\/","title":{"rendered":"pgtop – a top clone for PostgreSQL"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to meta::cpan<\/a> records, the first release of pgtop<\/a> is dated April 26, 2005, which makes this little software more than 15 years old<\/b>!<\/p>\n

Back then I had just found out about the brilliant mytop<\/a> by Jeremy Zawodny, and my day-to-day experience being on Postgres, IIRC version 6.5.3, I decided to try and “convert” mytop to Postgres.<\/p>\n

Being quite naive, I thought the endeavour would be much easier than it really was. I’m glad I started though, which is why pgtop exists in the first place. It’s not the only one either. I seem to remember a few similar pgtop projects by other programmers.<\/p>\n

After using MySQL and Percona Server for many years, due to a new job, I have gone back to Postgres, version 9.5 and 10 at this time. In recent months, I have done some work to improve performance of our database queries, and remembered writing and using pgtop years before.<\/p>\n

Since I lost(*) the original sources, I tried the pgtop version I last uploaded to CPAN, 0.05, dated 2008. It did work, in the sense that I could run the same perl code unmodified, a great testament to Perl as language and as runtime<\/b>. It didn’t work because the underlying Postgres meta tables that were used in version 6 changed their schema in the 10-12 years since :-)<\/p>\n

I spent some time to adapt the metadata queries to work with recent Postgres versions, and was slightly amused by the quality of my 15 year old code… The best feeling about this little tool was to rediscover how useful a few dozen lines of code can be<\/b>. The service provider monitoring helps, but doesn’t even come close to the level of detail pgtop can provide.<\/p>\n

After getting pgtop to work again, I quickly added a few more useful features. I was pleased by the efficiency with which I could work on this tool, considering its age.<\/p>\n

So far I added just what was strictly necessary to me:<\/p>\n