Re: Problems tuning shared_buffers value

Bill Moran <wmoran(at)potentialtech(dot)com> writes:
> curious about some things, so I set shared_buffers to 16 (which the
> config file claims is the lowest allowable value) The result was
> that Postgre refused to start. I upped it to 32 and the result
> was the same.
> I looked in both /var/log/messages and in /usr/local/pgsql/logfile
> and found nothing about _why_ it wouldn't start,

There's something broken about your logging setup then, because the
postmaster will most definitely tell you why it's not starting:

$ postmaster -B 16
postmaster: The number of buffers (-B) must be at least twice the number of allowed connections (-N) and at least 16.
$ postmaster -B 32
postmaster: The number of buffers (-B) must be at least twice the number of allowed connections (-N) and at least 16.
$

Without having looked at the code, I think that these very-early-startup
messages may only get sent to stderr and not syslog; so take another
look at what you're doing with the postmaster's stderr.

regards, tom lane