Re: Config parameters

Jeremy Haile wrote:
> What is a decent default setting for work_mem and maintenance_work_mem,
> considering I am regularly querying tables that are tens of millions of
> rows and have 2-4 GB of RAM?

Well, work_mem will depend on your query-load. Queries that do a lot of
sorting should benefit from increased work_mem. You only have limited
RAM though, so it's a balancing act between memory used to cache disk
and per-process sort memory. Note that work_mem is per sort, so you can
use multiples of that amount in a single query. You can issue a "set" to
change the value for a session.

How you set maintenance_work_mem will depend on whether you vacuum
continually (e.g. autovacuum) or at set times.

> Also - what is the best way to determine decent settings for
> temp_buffers and random_page_cost?

With all of these, testing I'm afraid. The only sure thing you can say
is that random_page_cost should be 1 if all your database fits in RAM.

--
Richard Huxton
Archonet Ltd