Re: Exploring memory usage

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 9:14 AM, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net> wrote:
> It depends on the workload. Your 16M setting would make many of my clients'
> systems slow to an absolute crawl for some queries, and they don't run into
> swap issues, because we've made educated guesses about usage patterns.

Exactly.  I've had an old Pentium4 machine that did reporting and only
had 2G RAM with a 256M work_mem setting, while the heavily loaded
machine I mentioned earlier handles something on the order of several
hundred concurrent users and thousands of queries a second, and 16Meg
was a pretty big setting on that machine, but since most of the
queries were of the select * from sometable where pkid=123456 it
wasn't too dangerous.

It's all about the workload.  For that, we need more info from the OP.