Re: Windows shared_buffers limitations

Greg Smith wrote:

>Was working on some documentation today and I realized that I've taken for 
>granted the lore about not using large values for shared_buffers in 
>Windows without ever understanding why.  Can someone explain what the 
>underlying mechanism that causes that limitation is?  From poking the 
>archives I got the impression it was some page mapping issue but details 
>are elusive.

All I can offer is Magnus' explanation: "All evidence I've seen points to that
you should have shared_buffers as *small* as possible on win32, because memory
access there is slow. And leave more of the caching up to the OS."
<http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2007-10/msg01115.php>

Heikki said something similar here:
<http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2007-10/msg00242.php>

Rainer