Re: Performance problems with Postgresql

I'm very new to all this so I apologize if I do things incorrectly. I
got thrown into a mix here where I'm in charge of software, hardware
monitoring, lots of stuff, among them is our postgres database, which I
know very little about. I have been studying the posts and a couple of
postgresql books for weeks and weeks and I am currently so stuck I don't
know what else to do. By the way, thanks to everyone for their
contributions. I have learned a lot and had a lot of help from reading
your posts.

We have a static sitebuilder where our clients build and manage an
ecommerce site. They have to publish the site to get their changes to
showup on their web site. (We will soon be going to a dynamic site but
still need to support this one for some time). For most people this
process works fine, albeit a bit slow, (between 10 seconds and 5
minutes) but for our larger users, they publish process dies after a
while and they are unable to update their sites. I changed some memory
and postgresql.conf settings a while ago and it seemed to totally fix
the problem. Then we lost some RAM in our server. We were at 2.5 Gigs,
now at 2.25 Gigs, if that's even a valid amount. Anyways, ever since
then I'm having the same publishing problems. The main problem for my
large users is that after 5 minutes and 5 seconds the process just quits
and dissapears, and I can see it die out of the top. Here are some of
my current settings:

IBM Netfinity 7100
Dual P3 700 Mhz
2.25 Gigs of RAM
3 18 Gig SCSI Hard Drives RAID 5
Standard stuff here I guess

Here is the latest for my sysctl, of which i don't even understand the
shmmni. I have changed these settings quite a few times.

kernel.shmmni = 4096
kernel.shmall = 1610612736
kernel.shmmax = 1610612736

Here is some postgresql.conf stuff:

# Connection Parameters
#
#tcpip_socket = false
#ssl = false

max_connections = 128 # 1-1024
port = 5432
#hostname_lookup = false
#show_source_port = false

#unix_socket_directory = ''
#unix_socket_group = ''
#unix_socket_permissions = 0777

#virtual_host = ''

#krb_server_keyfile = ''

#
# Performance
#
#sort_mem = 512
#shared_buffers = 2*max_connections # min 16
#fsync = true

shared_buffers = 4096
sort_mem = 2048
#max_connections=128
#fsync=false

I need at least 128 connections because of a Sorry, too many clients
error that was occurring. I have tried so many different configurations
of shared buffers and sort memory that I don't know what to do now.
Some seem to work, but none very consistently. I've tried very high,
with so so results. Now I'm back to square one.

I apologize for the long post and for a major ignorance on my part. I
have tried to learn and read as much as I can but am at my wits end
here. If any onf you know any small tips I would greatly appreciate it.
Thanks.

Ben Jordan - Complete Newbie
bjordan(at)esbex(dot)com