Handling Linux cgroups

Many users run PostgreSQL on Linux. In case you are running more than just PostgreSQL on your system, it can be a good idea to sandbox PostgreSQL in a Linux kernel control group (cgroup) to make sure that the operating system statistics for PostgreSQL are somewhat isolated from the rest of the system. Sandboxing also makes a lot of sense, if there is more than one PostgreSQL instance on the same box. The key benefits are:

• Data for different instances is accounted for separately

• Hardware resources can be assigned to various instances directly

• A system going nuts won't eat resources from other systems

All these benefits make cgroups an investment worthwhile.

Setting up cgroups

Before we can dig into configuring cgroups, it is necessary to make sure that all important packages are present on the system.

On Fedora, the following line is needed to enable cgroups:

yum install libcgroup

On Ubuntu or Debian, the following line will solve the problem:

apt-get install cgroup-bin

Once...