Re: Memory Tuning

--- Bruno Wolff III <bruno(at)wolff(dot)to> wrote:
> I am looking for information on tuning memory usage for
> Postgres on Linux
> (2.2 kernel). In particular I have a lot of memory relative to
> the size
> of my database and am looking to reduce latency in queries.

<snip>

> For some idea of the specific problem, I am setting up a
> replacement
> web server for my hobby server. The new box has a 1GHz Tbird
> with 500MB
> of memory and a 20G 7200rpm IDE disk. The database is
> effectively static,
> with rows for 300 games, 4000 people and 11000 people/game
> ratings and
> a couple of other miscelaneous tables with a handful of rows
> each.

Your problem may not be the fault of poor memory management. By
default most (if not all) Linux distributions set IDE drives to
the safest and slowest settings possible. By tweaking the
settings using the hdparm utility you can reduce CPU utilization
and increase disk speed at the same time. Read this article for
some more information on the subject,
http://www.oreillynet.com/lpt/a/272 . Note: SCSI hard drives
often get excellent performance without any of the
aforementioned tuning.

Brent

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