Re: Auto-tuning work_mem and maintenance_work_mem

On Wed, Oct 9, 2013 at 02:11:47PM -0700, Josh Berkus wrote:
> On 10/09/2013 01:37 PM, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
> > If Heroku could increase maintenace_work_mem without having it affect
> > the amount of memory used by autovacuum workers, I'm fairly confident
> > that our setting would be higher. Sure, you can just increase it as
> > you need to, but you have to know about it in the first place, which
> > is asking too much of many people tasked with semi-routine maintenance
> > tasks like creating indexes.
>
> Personally, I never got why we used maint_work_mem instead of work_mem
> for bulk-loading indexes. What was the reason there?

Because 'maintenance' operations were rarer, so we figured we could use
more memory in those cases.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> http://momjian.us
EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com

+ Everyone has their own god. +