Re: The shared buffers challenge

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Claudio Freire <klaussfreire(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Merlin Moncure <mmoncure(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> Point being: cranking buffers
>> may have been the bee's knees with, say, the 8.2 buffer manager, but
>> present and future improvements may have render that change moot or
>> even counter productive.
>
> I suggest you read the docs on how shared buffers work, because,
> reasonably, it would be all the way around.
>
> Recent improvments into how postgres manage its shared buffer pool
> makes them better than the OS cache, so there should be more incentive
> to increase them, rather than decrease them.
>
> Workload conditions may make those improvements worthless, hinting
> that you should decrease them.
>
> But you have to know your workload and you have to know how the shared
> buffers work.

I am not denying that any of those things are the case, although your
assumption that I haven't read the documentation was obviously not
grounded upon research. What you and I know/don't know is not the
point. The point is what we can prove, because going through the
motions of doing that is useful. You are also totally missing my
other thrust, which is that future changes to how things work could
change the dynamics of .conf configuration -- btw not for the first
time in the history of the project.

merlin