Re: shared_buffers Question

On Sat, 2004-07-31 at 10:25, Joe Lester wrote:
> I've been running a postgres server on a Mac (10.3, 512MB RAM) with 200
> clients connecting for about 2 months without a crash. However just
> yesterday the database and all the clients hung. When I looked at the
> Mac I'm using as the postgres server it had a window up that said that
> there was no more disk space available to write memory too. I ended up
> having to restart the whole machine. I would like to configure postgres
> so that is does not rely so heavily on disk-based memory but, rather,
> tries to stay within the scope of the 512MB of physical memory in the
> Mac.
>
> Am I correct in thinking that lowering that value of shared_buffers in
> postgresql.conf will reduce the amount of disk space that is swapped
> for memory?
>
> I lowered the value from 2000 down to 500. Was that the right thing to
> do or should I have gone the other way? Any other settings I should
> look at? Thanks!

Your shared buffers are almost certainly not the problem here. 2000
shared buffers is only 16 Megs of ram, max. More than likely, the
database filled up the data directory / partition because it wasn't
being vacuumed.