Re: db growing out of proportion

Robert Creager <Robert_Creager@LogicalChaos.org> writes:
> Thanks for the hint.  I just upped my shared_buffers to 8192, fsm_relations to 10000, fsm_pages to 100000, sort_mem
to64000, and an UPDATE which was taking over 2 hours dropped down to  1 to 2 minutes! 

Cool ... but it's not immediately obvious which of these changes did the
trick for you.  What settings were you at before?  And what's the
details of the problem query?

The first three settings you mention all seem like reasonable choices,
but I'd be hesitant to recommend 64M sort_mem for general use (it won't
take very many concurrent sorts to drive you into the ground...).  So
I'm interested to narrow down exactly what was the issue here.

            regards, tom lane