Christoph Anton Mitterer
<christoph(dot)anton(dot)mitterer(at)physik(dot)uni-muenchen(dot)de>
wrote:
> Well I'm still very unsure on how to configure many values...
> We've increased e.g. shared_buffers, temp_buffers, work_mem,
> maintenance_work_mem, max_stack_depth... and this greatly improved
> performance. But I can hardly judge to which values I should
> increase all these (and a few more).
Maybe the ellipses cover these, but wal_buffers and
checkpoint_segments should generally be adjusted, too. I almost
always need to tweak some of the costing factors, too; but
appropriate settings there depend not only on your hardware, but
also your schema, data, and application mix.
The best source of information on this that I know is Greg Smith's
"PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance" book. (It also discusses older
versions, so don't let the "9.0" in the title put you off.) Some of
these settings are best tuned through an iterative process of
monitoring while making small adjustments.
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/books/
-Kevin