Re: appropriate sort_mem & shared buffers

On Fri, 21 Dec 2001, Tom Lane wrote:

> But since you didn't
> say how many concurrent backends you expect to run, this is all just
> theorizing in the dark.


What is the relation between number of connections and buffers?
For example I have two needs. One is to have few connections on some data
cleanup. There I figure I should have higher buffers/sort_mem (buffers
currently set to 8000 with 1GB of RAM). The other is a database for a web
site where I would expect many users. I was thinking that the higher the
buffer size the longer it would take for the database to allocate the
memory before it can serve the query. Given that on the second machine the
tables are also smaller I was thinking something in the order to 500
Buffers (machine has 512MB and I expect peak to be 5 to 10 users
simultaneously with mostly simple queries on relatively small tables or
indexed access).