Re: Increase default effective_cache_size?

* Tom Lane (tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote:
> Russ Brown <pickscrape@gmail.com> writes on pgsql-general:
> > Thank you: the problem was the effective_cache_size (which I hadn't
> > changed from the default of 1000). This machine doesn't have loads of
> > RAM, but I knocked it up to 65536 and now the query uses the index,
> > without having to change the statistics.
>
> Considering recent discussion about how 8.2 is probably noticeably more
> sensitive to effective_cache_size than prior releases, I wonder whether
> it's not time to adopt a larger default value for that setting.  The
> current default of 1000 pages (8Mb) seems really pretty silly for modern
> machines; we could certainly set it to 10 times that without problems,
> and maybe much more.  Thoughts?

I'd have to agree 100% with this.  Though don't we now have something
automated for shared_buffers?  I'd think effective_cache_size would
definitely be a candidate for automation (say, half or 1/4th the ram in
the box...).

Barring the ability to do something along those lines- yes, I'd
recommend up'ing it to at least 128M or 256M.
Thanks,
    Stephen