Magnus Hagander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Those are not comments on the actual patch, of course. For that one, it > looks to me like it's the wrong fix. I don't think we should be adding > to shared buffers like that - if somebody asked for a specific value > they should get that.
Agreed, this is really inappropriate. The whole test probably needs to be rethought. I think the idea was to ensure that you couldn't run out of pinnable buffers if all backends were concurrently doing UPDATEs that touched two pages. But it's an underestimate --- for instance, if the UPDATE is doing an indexscan then there's likely an index page pinned somewhere as well. Worse, if you're joining N tables then there's likely N or N*2 pages pinned at any instant. Personally what I think we should do is intentionally break the current Gentoo packaging --- we already unintentionally broke it, but changing the code that those ridiculous parameter values are accepted again is NOT the appropriate next step. I'd be for raising the minimum -B to a couple hundred. I'm not sure if we should continue to enforce any minimum -B-to-N ratio, but if we do, let's make sure that it's measured without counting the autovac processes, so as to keep the error message simple. I think at the time we set the current minimum -B we were still intending that you could run in a half meg or so SHMMAX allocation. That's certainly history. Maybe we should target 2 meg as the rock bottom minimum? regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq