Re: Swappiness setting on a linux pg server

[Jim C. Nasby - Thu at 11:45:32AM -0500]
> > > The issue with pg_xlog is you don't need bandwidth... you need super-low
> > > latency. The best way to accomplish that is to get a battery-backed RAID
> > > controller that you can enable write caching on.
> >
> > Sounds a bit risky to me :-)
>
> Well, you do need to understand what happens if the machine does lose
> power... namely you have a limited amount of time to get power back to
> the machine so that the controller can flush that data out. Other than
> that, it's not very risky.

We have burned ourself more than once due to unreliable raid controllers
...

> quantities of memory. So in your case, 600M wouldn't be pushing things
> much at all. Even 1G wouldn't be that out of the ordinary. Also remember
> that the more memory for shared_buffers, the less for
> sorting/hashes/etc. (work_mem)

What do you mean, a high value for the shared_buffers implicates I
can/should lower the work_mem value? Or just that I should remember to
have more than enough memory for both work_mem, shared_buffers and OS
caches? What is a sane value for the work_mem? It's currently set to
8M.