Shared memory for large PostGIS operations

(from #postgresql IRC on freenode)

darkblue_b I did an interesting experiment the other day davidfetter_vmw .. davidfetter_vmw do tell
darkblue_b well you know I do these huge monolithic postGIS queries on an otherwise idle linux machine.. and there was
apersistant thought in my head that Postgresql+PostGIS did not make good use of memory allocation >2G 

darkblue_b so I had this long, python driven analysis.. 15 steps.. some, unusual for me, are multiple queries running
atonce on the same data ... and others are just one labor intensive thing then the next   
    (one result table is 1.8M rows for 745M on disk, others are smaller)

darkblue_b I finally got the kinks worked out.. so I ran it twice.. 4.5 hours on our hardware.. once with
shared_buffersset to 2400M and the second time with shared_buffers set to 18000M 

darkblue_b work_mem was unchanged at 640M and.. the run times were within seconds of each other.. no improvement, no
penalty

darkblue_b I have been wondering about this for the last two years

davidfetter_vmw darkblue_b, have you gone over any of this on -performance or -hackers? darkblue_b no - though I think
Ishould start a blog .. I have a couple of things like this now darkblue_b good story though eh ? 

 davidfetter_vmw darkblue_b, um, it's a story that hasn't really gotten started until you've gotten some feedback from
-performancedarkblue_b ok - true... 

darkblue_b    pg 9.1  PostGIS 1.5.3    Ubuntu Server Oneiric 64bit  Dual Xeons  
one Western Digital black label for pg_default; one 3-disk RAID 5 for the database tablespace

==
Brian Hamlin
GeoCal
OSGeo California Chapter
415-717-4462 cell