Re: Postgres v MySQL 5.0

usleepless(at)gmail(dot)com writes:
> i agree. lots of times postgresql is perceived as slow, because of
> out-of-the-box configuration. most importantly, the memory
> configuration.

The defaults are a lot higher than they used to be, so I suspect that
with 8.2, this may be less of an issue than it has traditionally been,
particularly in that 8.2 uses various resources more effectively than
has been true in the past.

To wit... I did a "CVS HEAD" install the other day, to do some
Slony-I testing. The *ONLY* config change I made was to change the
port number. (Because the box already has 9 other production PG
instances running on it! ;-))

The defaults for various interesting things were...
max_connections = 100
shared_buffers = 32MB
max_fsm_pages = 204800

The default work_mem was 1MB, which is arguably low, on a machine with
15GB of RAM :-).

But frankly, I don't see any particular problem with the defaults.
32MB is *not* an over-tiny amount of shared memory; it's enough to be
meaningful for more than merely a trivial workload.

It looks like initdb is doing a better job of detecting system sizing
than it used to, and the default numbers are no longer embarrassingly
low. The 524K of yesteryear *was* embarrassing, but 32MB seems enough
larger to me.
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