Markus Bertheau <twanger(at)bluetwanger(dot)de> writes:
>> It's already true that the individual buffers, as opposed to the buffer
>> descriptors, are allocated only as needed; which makes the overhead
>> of a large local_buffers setting pretty small if you don't actually do
>> much with temp tables in a given session. So I was thinking about
>> making the default value fairly robust, maybe 1000 (as compared to
>> the historical value of 64...).
> Why does the dba need to set that variable at all then?
Because you do have to have a limit. You want the thing trying to keep
all of a large temp table in core?
regards, tom lane