Re: two memory-consuming postgres processes

"Scott Marlowe" <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On Fri, May 2, 2008 at 1:38 PM, Alexy Khrabrov <deliverable(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> I randomly increased values in postgresql.conf to
>>
>> shared_buffers = 1500MB
>> max_fsm_pages = 2000000
>> max_fsm_relations = 10000

> On a laptop with 2G ram, 1.5Gig shared buffers is probably WAY too high.

s/probably/definitely/, especially seeing that OS X is a bit of a memory
hog itself. I don't think you should figure on more than 1GB being
usefully available to Postgres, and you can't give all or even most of
that space to shared_buffers.

> No, the background writer reads through the shared buffers for dirty
> ones and writes them out. so, it's not really using MORE memory, it's
> just showing that it's attached to the ginormous shared_buffer pool
> you've set up.

Yeah. You have to be aware of top's quirky behavior for shared memory:
on most platforms it will count the shared memory against *each*
process, but only as much of the shared memory as that process has
touched so far. So over time the reported size of any PG process will
tend to climb to something over the shared memory size, but most of that
isn't "real".

I haven't directly checked whether OS X's top behaves that way, but
given your report I think it does.

regards, tom lane