Housekeeping & HUD issues.This is ridiculous

[colossk]

Why is my HUD not showing up until anywhere from 6-10 orbits and why does housekeeping take over 24hours to complete?

I bought the original PT, PT2 and PT3. After experiencing several HUD and housekeeping performance issues with PT3 I switched to HEM about 1.5 years ago. So I decided to try PT3 again becasue I "heard" that these problems were fixed.
My 2 issues for leaving your product for the compettion, HUD was unreliable (sometimes wouldn't appear for several orbits and it would constantly dissapear and re-apear for no reasons) and housekeeping took forever.

I loaded up PT3 and the HUD was working fine with a database of maybe 10k hands. So I import one of my databases which hold about 2 million hands. Vacum and analyze were done quickly but then it rebuild the cache and it took 27 hours!! After waiting 27 hours I loaded up some tables to play 6 tbales of 6 max and the HUD wouldn't show up on each table until anywhere from 4-11 orbits of playing. Sometimes for no reason at all the HUD would dissapear one on of the players and re-appear 10 seconds later.

I imported my final 1 million hands from another database into PT3 and went thru the housekeeping process again. I checked, vacuum, analyze and update cache Currentlly it is rebuilding my cache again and at this rate it will be another 27h before it's finished. This is really unacceptable. Either I am doing something wrong or your product is really inferior when it comes to certain issues. Your product is superior as far as custom stats go and thats the only reason why I tried it again.

Why does housekeeping take so long and why is my HUD unreliable?

I've read the FAQ and my postgres is version 8.4. My hard drive is defragged every 2 weeks and postgres is stopped while the defrag is done. My computer isn't old, and PT3 and my poker client are flagged as Run as Administrator. I really want to like your product and use it but unles these issues can be resolved I don't see myself buying pT4

[kraada]

The housekeeping takes so long because it is calculating every stat for every player - and given the number of hands you've imported, it takes a long time. Once it's finished and your cache is at 100% there shouldn't be a delay of even one hand while playing - let alone several orbits. In order to figure out what's going wrong there, though, we'd need to see your log file. [url=http://www.pokertracker.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=45&t=20464]This tutorial[]/url] will explain how to get and send us the log file and we'll take a look and make sure this gets resolved for you.

Also, for the record, housekeeping will be completely behind the scenes in PT4 - you will never need to touch it.

[kydechuk01]

Some practical advices if you using such huge databases.

1) Buy SSD drive. On mine Intel speed of hands importing is about 400-500 h/sec, on old drive it was about 150-170 h/s.
2) Tune up your PostgreSQL server config to use more memory for maintance etc (many FAQs to do this on the forum). (for example - If you turn off fsync option for the time of import - it will give much speed to the process)
2) Keep your observed hands in separate database off your currently played hands, so housekeeping of current hands base will be more fast.
3) Not try to import all observed hands by one pass. 200-300k packs okay.
4) If your drive not SSD, keep postgre database folder on separate logical/physical drive for much faster defragmentation (no other data) and defrag it every time after Import but before Analyse & Update Cache process.

With all above, I'm importing observed hands by packs of 200k and it done by 40-45 mins.

[colossk]

Thaks for the advice, I'll look into buying a SSD drive.

Currently I can't do anything with my log file as I'm @ 49 hours and about 65% done. I'll send it when I can access PT3

[MoniesRemovalPLC]

If you turn off fsync option for the time of import - it will give much speed to the process

can you post a link to the changes needed to be made in the config file for this change, also will this speed up the cache rebuild time? i found the #fsync = on in the file, is it just a matter of deleting the # and changing the on to off?

[kydechuk01]

You can start at Performance Tuning PostgreSQL.

And the most cool topic is HOW TO MAKE POKERTRACKER FLY . . . . (well almost)

Yes. You should stop Postgre service (Run->services.msc, find posgresql service - rightclick stop)
remove # and change default option to
Fsync = off
also you can uncomment and set this option to off:
full_page_writes = off
and start service again.

And you must know about the risk - fsync off lets Postgre not to synchronize cache data to disk and if your OS hangs up or Power cuts off in the middle database working process - you can lose it. So you should use this method for short period of import only.

[MoniesRemovalPLC]

yh i have read the 2 threads you posted above, thanks for the tip