Fw: Help me put 2 Gigs of RAM to use

Hello,

PostgreSQL has served us very well powering a busy national pet
adoption website. Now I'd like to tune our setup further get more out
of hardware.

What I'm noticing is that the while the FreeBSD server has 4 Gigs of
memory, there are rarely every more than 2 in use-- the memory use
graphs as being rather constant. My goal is to make good use of those 2
Gigs of memory to improve performance and reduce the CPU usage.

The server has 4 2.33 Ghz processors in it, and RAIDed 15k RPM SCSI
disks.

Here are some current memory-related settings from our postgresql.conf
file. (We currently run 8.2, but are planning an upgrade to 8.4
"soon"). Do you see an obvious suggestions for improvement?

I find the file a bit hard to read because of the lack of units in
the examples, but perhaps that's already been addressed in future
versions.

 max_connections        = 400 # Seems to be enough us
 shared_buffers         = 8192
 effective_cache_size   = 1000
 work_mem               = 4096
 maintenance_work_mem   = 160MB

Thanks for your suggestions!

   Mark

[I tried to post this yesterday but didn't see it come through. This
message is a second attempt.)

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   Mark Stosberg            Principal Developer
   mark@summersault.com     Summersault, LLC
   765-939-9301 ext 202     database driven websites
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