Re: explanation of some configs

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>> On Sat, 2009-02-07 at 01:52 +0100, Thomas Finneid wrote:
>>
>> effective_cache_size
>>
> This is just a hint to tell the planner how much cache will generally be
> available.

ok, but available for what?

> The number should be reflective of your shared buffers +
> available operating system cache. If you database is postgresql only you
> can generally set this very high 75% of available ram. If not then you
> need to tone it down.

So that means, if I have 8GB ram and have set shared buffer to e.g. 4GB,
I should set the effective_cache_size to at least 4GB otherwise the
planner will assume I dont have as much memory available so it would be
sort of pointless so set shared_buffer to 4GB?

>> checkpoint_segments
>> - specifies the number of segments?
>
> The number of segments that will be used before a checkpoint is forced.

So to sum it up:

- Specifies the number of memory segments the WAL will use before a
checkpoint occur. (A checkpoint guarantees the data has been written to
disk, including dirty pages.)
- A segment is 16MB and the number of actually used segments are dynamic.
- If this number is too low or the transaction is large, PG will spend
more time on performing checkpoint operations which decreases performance.

Q1:

So checkpoint_time is then just another way of expressing the same?
I.e. to ensure that if the segments have not been filled, which would
foce a checkpoint, a checkpoint is at least forced at the specified time
lapse?

Q2:

So how does this relate to WAL buffers? It seems to me that wal_buffers
are not needed. Based on the above explanation.

regards

thomas