Re: Configuration Advice

> Generally speaking, once you've gotten to the point of swapping, even a
> little, you've gone too far.  A better approach is to pick some
> conservative number, like 10-25% of your ram for shared_buffers, and 1
> gig or so for maintenance work_mem, and then increase them while
> exercising the system, and measure the difference increasing them makes.
>
> If going from 1G shared buffers to 2G shared buffers gets you a 10%
> increase, then good.  If going from 2G to 4G gets you a 1.2% increase,
> it's questionable.  You should reach a point where throwing more
> shared_buffers stops helping before you start swapping.  But you might
> not.
>
> Same goes for maintenance work mem.  Incremental changes, accompanied by
> reproduceable benchmarks / behaviour measurements are the way to
> determine the settings.
>
> Note that you can also vary those during different times of the day.
> you can have maint_mem set to 1Gig during the day and crank it up to 8
> gig or something while loading data.  Shared_buffers can't be changed
> without restarting the db though.
>

I'm currently benchmarking various configuration adjustments.  Problem is
these tests take a really long time because I have to run the load
process... which is like a 9 hour deal.  That's why I'm asking for advice
here, because there's a lot of variables here and it's really time costly
to test :)

I'm still working on the benchmarkings and by Friday I should have some
interesting statistics to work with and maybe help figure out what's going
on.


Thanks!

Steve