PostgreSQL extension to remove all pages of specific relations from the shared buffer.

The extension was heavily inspired by pg_prewarm and functions as a complementary tool: Whereas pg_prewarm adds pages from a relation to the shared buffer, pg_cooldown removes them again.

The main purpose of this tool is to easily simulate cold-start scenarios in research.

Installation

Install like a normal contrib extension using make and make install. Afterwards, the extension can be activated with CREATE extension pg_cooldown;.

Usage

pg_cooldown can be used just like pg_prewarm: SELECT pg_cooldown('my_relation'); removes all buffered data pages of the relation from the shared buffers.

Likewise, SELECT pg_cooldown('my_relation_pkey'); can be used to remove the pages of the primary key index of the relation. This also works for secondary index structures: SELECT pg_cooldown('my_index_name');