Re: recommendations for reducing mem usage on local dev machine

"Anton Melser" <melser(dot)anton(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> I am stuck for the moment with 1gig of ram on a win xp machine running
> a 8.2.3 postgres. With the java website taking 300meg, eclipse taking
> 250meg+, firefox 150meg+, all of which are going to be nasty to reduce
> the mem usage of, I am looking at reducing postgres usage (the java
> website runs on postgres). The db is not really a bottleneck for
> development, so I am not concerned about reducing things very low. At
> the moment I have around 10 postgres processes in the taskmanager, 5
> of which are taking around 40meg.

It's fairly likely that that report is misleading: most Unix versions
of "top" report Postgres' shared memory as belonging to *each* backend,
and I'll bet taskmanager is doing the same thing. You could reduce
shared memory usage (cut shared_buffers in particular), which might make
the reported usage drop to say 20mb per process, but you only saved
20mb not 20*5.

It sounds to me like you're simply wishing for more than your box can
handle. Have you thought about running the client and server parts of
your development on separate boxes? Or maybe install an OS with less
overhead than Windoze?

regards, tom lane