Re: Postgresql on an AMD64 machine

On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 04:19:24PM -0400, Donald Courtney wrote:

> The system has 8 CPUs w/ 32 GB - I'm hoping to see some benefit to large
> caches -
> Am I missing something key with postgreSQL?

Yeah. Postgres makes extensive use of the kernel's cache (or, more
precisely, assumes that the kernel is doing some caching on its own).
So the bulk of the memory should be left to the kernel to handle, and
shared_buffers be set relatively slow.

This was the standard wisdom with releases previous to 8.0; I'm not sure
if anyone confirmed to still hold after the buffer manager changes in
8.0 and later in 8.1 -- we saw extensive redesign of the bufmgr on both,
so the behavior may have changed. If you wanna test, I'm sure lots of
people here will be interested in the results.

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]surnet.cl>)
"This is a foot just waiting to be shot" (Andrew Dunstan)