Re: effective_cache_size vs units

On Tue, Dec 19, 2006 at 10:12:34PM +0000, Gregory Stark wrote:
>
> "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
>
> > Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> writes:
> >> Oh, you mean MB vs Mb. Man, it had to be that simple :)
> >
> > ISTM we had discussed whether guc.c should accept units strings in
> > a case-insensitive manner, and the forces of pedantry won the first
> > round. Shall we reopen that argument?
>
> Nope, I just checked back in the archive and that's not what happened. There
> was an extended discussion about whether to force users to use the silly KiB,
> MiB, etc units. Thankfully the pedants lost that round soundly.
>
> There was no particular discussion about case sensitivity though Simon made
> the case for user-friendly behaviour:
>
> > I think we are safe assume to that
> >
> > kB = KB = kb = Kb = 1024 bytes
> >
> > mB = MB = mb = Mb = 1024 * 1024 bytes
> >
> > gB = GB = gb = Gb = 1024 * 1024 * 1024 bytes
> >
> > There's no value in forcing the use of specific case and it will be just
> > confusing for people.
>
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-07/msg01253.php
>
> And Jim Nasby said something similar:
>
> > Forcing people to use a specific casing scheme is just going to lead to
> > confusion and user frustration. If there's not a very solid *functional*
> > argument for it, we shouldn't do it. Wanting to enforce a convention that
> > people rarely use isn't a good reason.
>
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-07/msg01355.php
>
> There was a lone comment from Thomas Hallgren in favour of case sensitivity in
> the name of consistency. But Nasby's comment was directly in response and
> nobody else piped up after that.
>

My one comment is that a little 'b' is used to indicate bits normally
and a capital 'B' is used to indicate bytes. So
kb = '1024 bits'
kB = '1024 bytes'
...

I do think that whether or not the k/m/g is upper case or lower case
is immaterial.

Ken
> --
> Gregory Stark
> EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
>
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