Re: Auto-tuning work_mem and maintenance_work_mem

On Wed, Oct  9, 2013 at 07:33:46PM -0700, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> I hear a lot of complaints about "the first 15 minutes experience" of
> Postgres. It's easy to scoff at this kind of thing, but I think we
> could do a lot better there, and at no real cost - the major blocker
> to doing something like that has been fixed (of course, I refer to the
> SysV shared memory limits). Is the person on a very small box where
> our current very conservative defaults are appropriate? Why not ask a
> few high-level questions like that to get inexperienced users started?
> The tool could even have a parameter that allows a packager to pass
> total system memory without bothering the user with that, and without
> bothering us with having to figure out a way to make that work
> correctly and portably.

I think the simplest solution would be to have a parameter to initdb
which specifies how much memory you want to use, and set a new variable
available_mem from that, and have things auto-tune based on that value
in the backend.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + Everyone has their own god. +