PGConf.Russia 2022

Replication is one of the important mechanisms designed to provide database fault tolerance and scalability. In our practice, we regularly encounter the problem of low replication performance. This prompted us to investigate the factors that affect the speed of physical replication. In this presentation, I will talk about our findings. I will also demonstrate the differences in replication performance for various versions of PostgreSQL.

In June 2020, AlfaStrakhovaniye was obliged to use RSA 2.0 government services along with other insurance companies. It was the only way to sell car insurance in Russia. AlfaStrakhovaniye is a leader in car insurance, and its applications degraded under the pressure of calls. It wasn't planned. Postgres used a huge amount of CPU and memory. Nobody could tell what was going on. Degradation started and stopped for no reason. Dev Team and Postgres Pro experts solved that problem. MyBatis in Java services was the killer. Our story is about the development of applications for heavy workloads and technical ignorance while using frameworks.

The plv8 extension is very underestimated, though it can help simplify development for a variety of tasks. It's been a year since we started using this extension in our projects. The main reason for its low popularity is the complexity of building. Moreover, building plv8 requires a lot of traffic and disc space for temporary files. That's why we decided to build plv8 and provide ready-made binaries freely to anyone interested, not just as an offering for our customers. First, we made the binaries available on GitHub. Then we created a Docker image for Postgres with pre-installed plv8 based on Debian. It looked too heavy to us, and we decided to check Alpine, however, building it for Alpine appeared to be more complicated than we expected. I'll explain what difficulties we faced and how we managed to overcome them. I will also list the tasks that can be solved with plv8 and provide advice on how to make the development process more convenient. I will also share the links to our Docker images for the latest Postgres 13 and Postgres 14 releases, that are compact and can be used for any types of tasks.