Re: memory

> I've a relatively small machine (512MB) that I am setting up as a small area
> database server. And I was trying to get the memory balanced out for this
> machine. I don't plan on running anything other than postgresql and whatever
> might be required to operate sanely on the network.
> So I was changing my shared buffers and found I couldn't really get over 3500
> before SHMMAX started complaining.
> That being done, I'm running some jobs now on this server and have noticed that
> postgres uses only a few percentage points of the available memory according to top.
> So, I'm trying to understand why I don't have more memory being used up by these
> SQL jobs. I was assuming that running 100 SQL statements/second would suck up a
> lot of memory.
> Right now all it seems to burn in CPU cycles more than RAM.
> Maybe I don't understand much about how postgres will appear to operate...
> But is the memory limited by the shared_buffers * max_connections?

Don't forget that if you database is significantly smaller than you memory, it could reside
entirely in Kernel memory cache. The shared_buffer is used (IIRC) to allocate memory specifically
for preforming complicated data transformations required by your issued SQL statement. The larger
larger the data set your transforming or the more complication your sql statements are,
performance can benefit from increased shared_buffers. However, I believe that this can reduce
the amount of memory available for caching the rest of your database in memory.

But to verify what I've mentioned please see the following:

http://www.varlena.com/varlena/GeneralBits/Tidbits/annotated_conf_e.html
http://www.varlena.com/varlena/GeneralBits/Tidbits/perf.html
http://www.postgresql.org/files/documentation/books/aw_pgsql/hw_performance/

Regards,

Richard Broersma Jr.